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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.
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.
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
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.
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)