Comments

1
it may flow to faraway places elsewhere, but we have a lot of ecycling in the PNW. are they shipping the components to Africa?

if only there were reporters around here who could get the answer to that question...
2
I've been taking old computers and other e-waste to 1 Green Planet in Renton. No reason to keep obsolete or non functional electronics.
3
What I find shocking from the police report is that the window was estimated at $100 damage and the laptop plus 2 older computers added up to $3,710 in the report. Are you sure that was e-waste computers ?

Value loss:
$3,810.00
4
You should read Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter if you want to know what's going on with your e-waste (and every other kind of waste). E-waste is a pretty critical component of overseas manufacturing; the products or their components are reused to a surprising degree (your computers might be sold in Africa), and the recycling of the stuff that can't be, like copper wire, takes the place of mined materials, which are much harder on the environment.

For instance, between 2001 and 2011, China saved 9 billion tons of ore for all metals (except iron and steel), and also saved the 110 million tons of coal needed to smelt it.

It's not just electronics, either. EVERYTHING is recycled, from the steel in cars to the copper in your old Christmas tree lights, from your plastic strawberry basket to old electric motors to the cardboard from the covers of your old textbooks. Most of this stuff ends up going to China.

Note also that China is not just a destination for our waste; they are close to becoming the world's biggest generator of waste. Already in many types of recycling, China gets more of its raw recyclables internally than from us.

The recycling industry, here and in China, is unimaginably vast, similar in scale to Silicon Valley, but it's not glamorous and it doesn't take place in South Lake Union or San Francisco, and there's no app for it, so no one writes sexy magazine articles about it. Almost all of the popular commentary about "e-waste" is uninformed rubbish, about as relevant to today's economy as steam railways.
5
I usually pull the hard drives out of old computers and drop them off at Staples for recycling. The only cheap way I've found to ensure old hard drives are erased is to smash them with a sledge hammer.

The volume of e-waste me and my company have generated is amazing though. The old desktop PCs are big and heavy, especially the CRT monitors. I have at least a little hope for the future given how small and light the replacement machines are. I'd estimate our current equipment ways a tenth what the old equipment did.
6
Ever see the videos of e-cycling in India? It's kids burning computers to get the metals out of them. Yep…that's just great for the environment and the kids breathing in that smoke.
7
I wish somebody would steal my old computers.
8
@6, yes, and that represents a tiny fraction of what goes on in the recycling world. Of course, much of what does go on is pretty horrific, but so is mining -- and so is leaving the junk to leach poison for fifty years, as used to happen to tens of millions of abandoned cars across the US.
9
@7, we were robbed (a long time ago) and the thief not only stole our pillowcases but cut up our pillows in order to haul his swag -- which included an ancient Mac Classic and, most hilariously, a non-working CRT monitor that must have weighed fifty pounds. Still an unpleasant experience, but I'm happy to see the idiot suffer under all that weight for nothing.
10
@8, I have no idea how much of the electronics recycling is done like that, but I have no idea how much or even if any is done in a cleaner method. I like to believe that most of it is clean, just like I don't think about where my cheeseburger comes from.
11
@10, read the book. No, most of it is not "clean", but neither is anything else. Note -- the Kindle version has something like a hundred color photographs that are not in the print edition.

It's an enormously complex problem, because we live in an enormously complex world. And while Americans like to think that we are alone on our island of wealth and modernity, surrounded by dusty poverty, the fact is that the rest of the world, including China, is modern too. China discards more electronics than we do, and they recycle more -- just not in the way we're used to.

So-called "green" recycling is extremely expensive and really only suited to recovering certain metals, like gold -- they grind the circuit boards and whatnot up in a huge shredder, like a car shredder (the biggest of which can grind 350 tons an hour), which makes it easy to extract gold chemically (and thus safely) but impossible to recover even more precious metals, like the rare earths, which end up in landfills.

The most efficient way to get the stuff out is also the most harmful to workers: cook the boards until the solder melts and pry the chips off.

Much worse, though, is the bare-bones technique for stripping insulation off of wire: burning it. A nasty business. A great deal of progress has been made in new techniques, though, which chop the wire into tiny bits and separate it into plastic and metal by vibration.

What people call "e-waste" is really just part of the supply chain for industry.

Armchair cultural critics like to bemoan stuff like this, but stuff like this is infinitely more valuable to modern economies than cultural criticism. Unless you fancy a return to subsistence farming and 45-year lifespans, global industrialization is going to continue. The important thing to recognize is the vast size of the industry, far beyond what most people can imagine -- in China there are entire malls the size of Southcenter devoted to reusing old tech -- not recycling it. Most of that stuff comes not from America but from China itself; 80 percent of American e-waste stays in the US, often in landfills, even today.
12
Seattle's Fremont Interconnections.org will wipe your hard drive and recycle your old computer. Free!

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