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Digital Waste Worth More Than Gold, Copper Ore
tcd004 writes "Imagine sheer mountains of discarded Pentium IIIs, tractor trailers overflowing with discarded wall warts. Photojournalist Natalie Behring visited Guiyu, China and documented the world's biggest digital dump where, for $2 per day, the locals sort, disassemble, and pulverize hundreds of tons of e-waste. The payoff is huge: computer waste contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, 40 times more copper than copper ore. But the detritus also leaches chemicals and metals into local water supplies."
1s and 0s as far as the eye can see!
Heh, look at all those motherboards.
Fuck do we ever rock.
If you say that it's environmentally irresponsibility to throw away computer equipment, your girlfriend can't get mad that you've got a cluster of Amiga2000s making your house look like a digital dump.
Years ago I saw this on a Discovery documentary. It was surprising how much gold they got out of old electronic junk. Perhaps we should sen all our discarded computers to third world countries (emergency aid, ya know), so that they can disassemble them and sell them back to us for a penny.
I'll start on a letter to Bush.
Finding a good use for old parts. They're better than most people I know who throw away a whole computer just because the latest software won't run on it. And if they can alleviate any toxic seepage into the soils doing so even better.
It's kind of sad though that environmental laws here, even though they mean well, ultimately make it too costly for us to recycle PCs here compared to China.
anyone who can dismantle supertankers with their bare hands deserves some respect.
Bender, is that you?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is literally taking gold digging to a whole other level.
We just isolated the source of the pet food contamination. The chinks were poisoning our animals with discarded computer waste!
Set those old machines to fold you insensitive bastards!
As far as I know, the value of the metals inside electronic waste is only a couple dollars per ton of waste. Some electronic waste recycling companies have found that it is much more profitable to resell things that still work (at roughly 90% discounts), and extract the working components from things that don't.
In hell, you will find a mountain of broken, feces-covered typewriters and a stack of copies of the First Folio.
...computer waste contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, 40 times more copper than copper ore...
:( I think I'm going to have to level up recycling.
I'm lucky if I get 4 Thorium ore from one mine
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
This is a sad situation where rich countries just dump their toxic wastes to the poor countries. It's a quick solution, and does not cause much (if any?) local political discussion. Out of sight, out of mind.
Unfortunately, this is a very irresponsible way to dispose off the toxic waste. Sure, the rich can claim that it is actually beneficial to the local economy in the poor countries. As the article mentioned, some dump site employs as many as 100,000 people. And sure, it's a global economy, meaning that anything can be "exported".
But, have we ever considered the consequences to the planet as a whole? After all, this planet belongs to everyone, and we should take up the responsibility to protect it better. The rich countries have the proper means and resources to handle the wastes better than the poor countries. But instead, we all chose the easy way out: we just let the poor poison the planet. It's currently poisoning China's, India's and Nigeria's backyard, so that America, Europe, Japan etc, can have their own little clean and green lawn.
Guess what happens when they run out of dumping ground? I visited a site a couple of years ago. I happened to ask what they would do in this case. The foreman said:"Easy, there are plenty of fishermen out of job, as the fish stock is running out. They would be happy to help us dump into the ocean." Ha, same attitude as to how the rich get rid off their wastes.
Good to know that we are all alike, rich or poor. Eventually, it will come to bite us all back from behind. Happy dumping, everyone.
They better watch out.... I think Microsoft has some prior art on that whole "digital dump" concept...
Don't we already have like a million stories about Chinese goldfarmers? Oh wait...
In China.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
...are the files I delete. This is just electronics.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
neither did I, until I saw a decent documentary on it, that focuses on shipbreaking in the Gujurat region of India. Unfortunately I can't find any pieces of the documentary online, but there is a CBS 60 minutes segment on shipbreaking on http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-620230815 8044631485&q=shipbreakers">google video.
Theres an excellent report booklet here http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/internationa l/press/reports/recycling-of-electronic-waste.pdf
If you read the article, it says "One ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore." This is the solution to the world's power needs...
But the detritus also leaches chemicals and metals into local water supplies.
They actually do that on purpose to achieve the ultimate Evil Villain rep. Plus they rape your cats on the side.
Is melting down dead computers for their trace gold content more or less ethical than melting down dead humans for their gold fillings?
On the one hand, computers are full of heavy metals and chlorine. On the other hand, Humans are 65% water, which is apparently the most greenhousy of the greenhouse gases.
IOU one (1) signature
Isn't this story from several years back?
Or is this just the annual repeat of a "look how evil the Unites States is" story?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This is what happens when corporations are allowed to circumvent the moral and ethical fabric of our country. It's what happens when Bush & cronies overturn environmental laws for the sake of special interest profits. Ironically, those same clowns try to claim that they're the beacons of morality in this country. They will burn, karma will be served.
Thankfully, the ROHS initiative has significantly reduced or eliminated heavy metals and toxic chemicals in electronics. The 3rd world population should be grateful for that industry initiative. There's still a long line of non-ROHS equipment that's heading to the scrapheap, but at least after a few years it will have been processed through.
Ok, if anyone is interested, I have tons of used 1's and 0's in my basement. They're pre-sorted. I'm willing to sell them for 2 cents/kilobit.
The bits will be sent to you as a self-extracting executable.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
For those who don't know what ROHS is....
We use them.
We pay them to recycle it and they get to keep all the goodies from the process.
Something seems wrong here...
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Even if it is true that computer-trash contains 17 times the gold, compared to gold-ore, it does not follow that it is "worth more", that would be true only if getting the raw-material, handling it and extracting the valuable metals cost precisely the same. Which ain't likely.
You also don't find all that many million-ton piles of computer-scrap just sitting around.
Another communist post. The article says they earn $2-$4 per day that means $730-$1460 per year. With the average Chinese salary being between $300 (rural) - $700 (city), I say it's a pretty decent job which you can see by the clothes they wear on the pictures. Sure it is toxic but so are many of China's jobs. As were ours 100 years ago.
Since 1965, I have been a recyler (cub scouts and boy scouts). Generally, it is paper, glass, and metal. It always struck me as the right thing to do. But the other day it dawned on me that it might be a mistake to do some of this. In particular for the metals. Paper, plastics, and glass will decay if they are not recycled, so it makes good sense to do them right away. But metals are a different issue. It struck me that we might wish to consider simply putting them in a dump for future use. The reason is that somewhere down the road, a number of metals will be very expensive. One example is copper. A number of mines will be used up (much sooner rather than later). While China is about to have 1-2 major copper mines come on-line (in Tibet, they have found a number of resources which is why they actually built the Tibetan railroad), in general, copper has been massively extracted. Within my lifetime, copper is going to head towards being VERY valuable. It seems that it would benefit the countries to garbage dump any waste and then work on creating GOOD extraction approaches. The idea of paying to ship our electronic "waste" to other countries has to be one of the most ludicrous actions that the west takes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I told you not to look in my garage!
Clods. Insensitive clods.
With all the people who'll be dumping their old analog sets, this is where it'll all go (the wire wraps alone would be highly desirable).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I suspect that gold mining itself does a lot more damage than this kind of recycling. And what are the alternatives? Dump it into a dump and not recycle it? That will leach even more toxic metals into the ground. Or stop producing electronics altogether?
I think it's good that this stuff is being recycled at all. We should now focus on:
-- reducing the amount of heavy metals we put into electronics
-- improving the safety and working conditions of the people doing the recycling
-- redesigning electronics to reduce overall waste and make parts easier to recycle
-- making sure that more electronics reach those countries in working order (open hardware standards and increasing compatibility can help with that)
Did anyone else read the title and think it was about World of Warcraft?
The spelling happened at a troubled time, but was it REALLY such a pain to use the word "or" instead of a comma?
The title sounds like "copper ore" is a celebratory slogan. Basically, the author of the article sounds like an idiot.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Is that you can help people and make a bundle of money at the same time.
Instead of "investing" your money in a bank account at 1% below the rate of inflation, buy some unit trusts (funds in the US I think) which invest in the developing world. (It's good practice to diversify anyway) You'll get a 10-20% return and you'll be pushing money into these developing economies, increasing employment and ultimately improving working conditions.
Deleted
I buy my ore from the AH, and resell it at a suitably extortionate price.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Because from experience I've found that Gold doesn't really shift in the markets.
Copper, Bronze and Silver (if you can get your hands on it) are great. Also being green and recycling End of Life magical items through disenchanting.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Only the sets with no SCART sockets. If your set has a SCART socket (and most have two or more nowadays), you can just plug a digital decoder straight into it. The socket labelled AV1 usually accepts RGB, which will give the absolute best picture.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
What a load of bullshit. If the payoff was "huge", why would companies pay to have it taken away to China? Gold ore is much easier to process in bulk from fairly homogeneous rock than trying to extract it from a pile of metal, plastic and glass components. Gold ore is anything from 0.5 ppm up, so this "17 times" is a meaningless figure. At best, it means a few grammes of gold per tonne of hardware. How many hundreds of manhours would it take to break it down and separate out the tiny scrapings of gold from electrical contacts? Copper is more easily scavenged from wiring and power supplies.
The images seem to be 404ing, with Mirrordot only giving the image on the first page. Mirror for the rest if them, anyone?
All rites reversed 2010
The BBC aired a report about this a few months ago.
It was shocking to see the amount of rubbish, and the pollution generated.
Without going into the maths, it always amazes me that it's cheaper to ship this stuff halfway around the world, rather than build a reprosessing plant or too and deal with it at home.
The report also showed another City where general waste was ending up. Washing powder packets, crisp/chip packets etc.
Such a shame that us developed countries have to shift our environmental responsibilities elsewhere, then criticize them for being less green than us. (My personal view from the UK...others may not agree)
I've said this for years now, that we will be mining old dumps of all sorts for refined materials which will have become too rare or too costly to extract conventionally.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
What are people thinking?! Install Slackware on them and they're good as new ;)
That doesn't look like a PCjr board to me, by the way.
The PCjr had various nonstandard connectors on the back. Also there were two slots on the board itself, for the optional 64K upgrade and the optional disk drive controller. Finally there was another large connector on the one side for the sidecar (I'm not sure if that connector was physically on the motherboard or not - it may have been a ribbon cable to the side - but obviously there was some connection for the sidecars on the motherboard).
Did you actually look at the pictures?
Talk about glass half empty!
Check it out and you will see people hard at work separating the old computer pieces into their constituent metals, so they can be melted down and - RECYCLED!!!!!! Isn't that a good thing???
This looks to me like a very effective looking recycling program (albeit one that looks like a hellhole on earth to work at!)
Do you have a better suggestion as to what to do with all this old computer crap (given that it has already been created)??
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
>>> "people who use this line usually don't mention why the other choices are so few and so bad. It's due to economic policy and the pressure of foreign multinationals to "modernize" the economy of third world nations"
... don't want the blood of child slaves in your chocolate? Well buy chocolate with the fairtrade logo (from a reputable source that's not likely to be just nicking the logo).
t m
This is why the Fairtrade movement is so awesome. It puts the power in the hands of the consumer (where it always has been really)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1272522.s
We say that businesses are corrupt, and they are, but we buy their products so we are guilty too. Have any computers got a fairtrade mark? I doubt it.
[But Greenpeace has a ranking for electronics producers that lists Dell and Nokia at the top and companies like LGE near the bottom.]
...and the most interesting thing about it is that they show all manner of munitions made by Russia, South Africa and China, but not a mention about having to clean up any from another large and powerful western democracy who no doubt has dropped quite a lot of ordnance on that country in the name of WMD ...or was it er... nasty dictators?... ummm.... yeah. Nasty dictators, that's got to be it.
Wow, didn't take long for someone to make a moronic political joke.
That wasn't funny.
HEY MORON, THEY PAY US TO TAKE THIS. WE'RE NOT FORCING ANYTHING ON THEM.
Did you get that? Do you understand the difference between what you're claiming is happening and what is REALLY happening?
You're an imbecile, a crybaby who thinks he knows better about the lives of others than they know themselves? So I'd like to ask, WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU THINK YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO TELL ANYONE HOW TO LIVE?
Because that's what you're doing. You're telling these people that they shouldn't be allowed to do this job, as you deem it too dangerous. But the point you soft headed retards always miss is these people have a RIGHT to do this work if they choose.
So save your liberal guilt, douchie, they aren't interested in listening to it and neither are we.
you actually read the green screen FBI warning, it's not your ordinary copyright notice :)
Slide 7 states: "One ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore." Now how does that work?
www.itjerk.com
Apparently the kid on the left side of picture 9 has developed some sort of delicious new pcb sandwich! The line starts here, I want one!
Okay, that's still a LOT of sets (we don't use SCART in the US, nor does the rest of N. America, or Asia, as far as I know)
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
People used to throw their computers out in the dumpster at my apartment in Minneapolis. On a weekly basis, I could count on retrieving the hard drive from at least one computer. From those hard drives I retrieved thousands of mp3s.
That is what I think of when I hear about digital recycling.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Because there's so damn many of them?
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
I looked at some other albums and saw the one about diamonds. I'm not a big fan of precious stones, but am surprised to see that all these diamonds are procured and processed for peanuts and then sold for hefty sums. Kind of sad that ppl still pay so much for diamonds.
"But the detritus also leaches chemicals and metals into local water supplies."
And there is no entrepreneur collecting the detritus, grinding it up and marketing as a pet food additive?
My main computer is a pentium iii you insensitive clod!
The documentary Manufactured Landscapes contains some surreal footage of the piles of sorted materials that get piled up from the recycling process. It also has footage of the shipyard recycling process which appeared to be all done by hand. The opening scene scrolling down the length of a manufacturing plant in China rivals the opening Star Destroyer scene in Star Wars IV in sheer scale.
I don't believe they exist.
I love AC's - you guys always put a smile on my face. Show me in my original post where I was telling anyone how they must live, where I said that someone shouldn't be allowed to do a job, and where I said we're forcing anything on anybody.
Your anger and hair-trigger temperment are delicious to me. I always know that I'm on to something when people get so mad; clearly it's a manifestation of their guilt and lack of understanding on a topic. Helps remind me that I'm on the right track whenever people are this defensive. And when they hide, of course. Yummy.
This has led him to photograph e-waste processing, assembly line and process work, shipbreaking, large scale extraction, urbanisation, and the Three Gorges dam project.
The Goethe Institute of Toronto recently screened the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, (also here) which followed Burtynsky in his Chinese travels, and reveals more of the backstory behind his photographs (which are published in the book Manufactured Landscapes).
you had me at #!
Sophisticated processing, even:
2 007705160402
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=
Or you could just ask for change for that paper dollar and ship it to India where it can be meilted down for more than 10% profit. Of course the government made that illegal back in December: From Mish Shedlock's globaleconomicanalysis blog: People who melt pennies or nickels to profit from the jump in metals prices could face jail time and pay thousands of dollars in fines, according to new rules out Thursday. Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny's metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint. "The nation needs its coinage for commerce," U.S. Mint director Ed Moy said in a statement. "We don't want to see our pennies and nickels melted down so a few individuals can take advantage of the American taxpayer. Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers." Under the new rules, it is illegal to melt pennies and nickels. It is also illegal to export the coins for melting. Travelers may legally carry up to $5 in 1- and 5-cent coins out of the USA or ship $100 of the coins abroad "for legitimate coinage and numismatic purposes."
Ah the joy of fiat money! Wasn't it only a few years ago when nearly 100% of the copper in pennies was replaced with cheaper zinc so its face value wouldn't drop below its scrap value? Now zinc is worth 12% more than the penny. Is anyone here old enough to remember when dimes were nearly pure silver (1964) and Nickels had Nickel as a primary ingredient? What will be next? Will the value of ink and paper in paper money exceed the face value? I know, let's mint money out of that nuclear waste everyone has been trying to figure out how to get rid of. That way, those economy-wrecking money savers will have every incentive to spend it, and spend it now!
Uncle Ben Benranke, fire up those currency printing presses! Wouldn't you like to have a Beowulf cluster of those?
How about a law demanding that goods may not be imported, if they were manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable in the destination country?
Better to impose a tarriff, as though China had OSHA, EPA, building codes, welfare, etc., such that the true cost of competition were leveled. I, know, that would make goods made by our funny-looking overseas slaves less expensive, can't do it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just vendering digital waste can be quite profitable as mining copper and gold and selling it on the AH is quite time consuming.
Uhh... I hate to tell you, but the planet doesn't belong 'to everyone'. Property rights, at least in the US, are individual. If someone from China, Japan, Mexico, or even a neighbor trespasses onto MY property, they'll find out very quickly that they don't own this specific piece of the Earth.
I dont know how you came to this communistic/socialistic conclusion that "this planet belongs to everyone" because it doesn't. And if you don't believe me, try to travel to North Korea sometime, some other God-forsaken wasteland of a country.
Libertas in infinitum
those pics look like they could easily have come from my bedroom, piles of circuit boards bins full of components, piles of electronics awaiting destruction, piles of copper wire for recycling, it brings me joy to see there are others like me out there. Actually i'm somewhat envious of the amounts of scrap these fellows can get there hands on, the amounts i can aquire through dumpster diving, curb shopping and freecycle aren't nearly as great., if only I could get corporations to dump their scraped equipment in my backyard instead of china's.
This is an old but always interesting story every time it crops up.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I'm not advocating total isolationism.... (That would entail refraining from importing or exporting ANY goods, in the strict sense of the word.)
.. with all of us ending up under some sort of "world government". But I'm FAR from accepting THAT as a good idea.)
You have to draw the line someplace, though - because ultimately, yes. Everything is indirectly related to everything else in some manner. That doesn't always give a country a good excuse to interfere with another country's affairs though. (Well, maybe it does, if you're an advocate of the "New World Order" concept
We could go the alternate route and use massive amounts of a natural resource that has tremendous intrinsic value (meaning we can do actual useful stuff with it) as a token for exchange of goods--a task that could just as easily be performed by a material that doesn't have anything better to do. I don't think that's a particularly practical way to go, personally.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"