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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!
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.
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. . . .
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.
Theres an excellent report booklet here http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/internationa l/press/reports/recycling-of-electronic-waste.pdf
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
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.
They actually pay to buy our scrap. They own it. It is up to them if they want to harvest it for the goodies. We have no right to complain here.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
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?
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.
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.
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.]
Because there's so damn many of them?
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Because there is only a small percentage of gold in gold ore. Most of gold ore is just useless rock.