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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

As an electrical engineer I am with you. There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities.

But the world is run by greedy bastards who don’t care about anything else than their own pockets. That’s how plastic gets ditched in the ocean. That’s how electronics get shipped to this e-waste dumping ground. Or old ships end up in Bangladesh.

I red probably too many science fiction books about future utopias, that the present makes me sad. Heck they can’t get the damn local commuter train line to run according the schedule in apparently wealthy part of Germany. Just shaking my head.

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> Heck they can’t get the damn local commuter train line to run according the schedule in apparently wealthy part of Germany.

They manage in neighboring Switzerland though.. Less greed and more pride for a job well done maybe?

> They manage in neighboring Switzerland though

At twice the ticket price, probably :)

They manage to run the trains on time in Japan for a fraction of the ticket price.

Cost of living adjusted? Japan, while generally rich, is surprisingly less expensive than I expected before visiting.

A big part of that is the devalued Yen, which is a recent phenomenon (~2-3y). Travelers with USD or EUR are going to think everything's cheap because of this.

But even ignoring the exchange rate (this is easy to do: just assume 100 yen = USD$1, like in the mid-2010s), most of the trains (or subways) are really cheap compared to costs I've seen in other countries (US/EU), and far better run on top of that.

My bet would be willingness to invest.

> There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities.

I'd love to learn more about this. What's the state of the art? How do the economics work out?

For now, I take my end-of-life electronics to the local BestBuy. They have pretty good recycling standards, which include attempts to reuse & refurbish devices:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pc...

The thing is that the economics are poor. Why? Because additional processing step of these materials in recycling plant produces worse quality materials that need purifying again if used for production. Except copper of course.

And there should be two viewpoints: one is the cheapest way of getting the raw materials for production of other things. And the second is the clean way of getting rid of tons of electronics waste. Think about shelves of 17” first generation LCDs. Still not broken, but just outdated. The second one imho justifies the higher costs of materials. But if someone will pay let’s say 5% more for a television that was produced from recycled material… I don’t know. I see everywhere around greenwashing and I would not trust this anymore.

It would ideal to price in end of life costs. Oh, it takes $100 to return that $50 item to usable materials? It is now a $150 item.

Of course, you should also price in the environmental costs of manufacturing, shipping, and using the thing.

So many challenges with this.

How do you quantify the environmental cost for an object over its entire life cycle?

How do you efficiently route the new funds to actually mitigate the damage?

How do you handle the inevitable black markets?

How do you avoid regressive effects?

I don’t have answers for all these. I just think “The Biome” is the scarce resource we should be using money to allocate.

> But the world is run by greedy bastards who don’t care about anything else than their own pockets. That’s how plastic gets ditched in the ocean.

The people who do the actual dumping tend to be poor, not the world running rich.

The people who decide that the dumping should happen are rich. They make the decision either by directly ordering it, or sometimes indirectly by arranging things so the poor people have no other choice.

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