What exactly happens to old hardware? Is it easily recyclable ?
The rest - which by mass, of course, is something approaching "all of it" - is mostly toxic fibre glass, epoxy and plastic that we don't really know what to do with. It's bad, even before you start talking about all the electricity and heat that was used to turn it into electronics in the first place.
I’m guessing there are no environmentally friendly alternatives to these materials than can be easily swapped in factories without much hassle.
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/new-biodegrada...
> The research will also provide Infineon with a fundamental understanding of the design and reliability challenges customers face with the new material in their core applications.
That is corporate-speak for: they have no idea.
And therefore, as a whole, the answer to that is: NO.
PCBs get delivered, sometimes without big components (coolers, screws/brackets fans removed), but also sometimes with those. They are shredded as a whole, including all soldered components, to a particle size of 2mm. Iron and aluminium are separated magnetically (in case of aluminium with an eddy current separator, iron with a static field). All three components, mostly-iron, mostly-aluminium and the rest are then melted down separately. Adherent plastics, electrolytes, epoxy, etc burn off during this process. Gas and ash are lead through separators that filter out the fly-ash as much as possible, which is buried somewhere as toxic waste, the rest is entered into the atmosphere after cleaning (afaik various liquids to bubble through to wash out soluble chemicals, which are then dried and buried). All three metalllic liquids are then metall alloys of various purities which are then cleaned and separated further by skimming off the slag, adding flux, electrolysis and other chemical separation methods. Most of the "other" fraction is copper, which is the main product overall, other rare metals such as gold occur in far smaller amounts and seemingly add only a little to the overall earnings in the process.
Please note that this is the process used in a relatively new plant in a Western European nation. I guess the "advantage" over the rest of the world is that at least there is a fly-ash separator and exhaust cleaning.