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Electronic Retailers In Europe Now Required To Take Back Old Goods
Qedward writes with this excerpt about the EU approach to E-waste: "A European Union law that will require all large electronic retailers to take back old equipment came into force yesterday. The new rules are part of a shake-up of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and will gradually be implemented across the EU over the next seven years. Waste electrical and electronic equipment, or WEEE, is one the fastest growing waste streams in the EU, but currently only one-third of electrical and electronic waste is separately collected and appropriately treated. Systematic collection and proper treatment is essential for recycling materials like gold, silver, copper and rare metals in used TVs, laptops and mobile phones."
If manufacturers have to go to the trouble of recycling their goods they might be tempted to make them more reliable rather than having 10K TVs that died 1 day after their warranty ran out sitting in their warehouse. Or alternatively perhaps we'll go back to goods that are designed to be repaired more easily instead of being junked just because 1 capacitor blew that could be replaced for pennies.
This is a really important step forward for the environment.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
As long as the fucking Chinese have a stranglehold on most of the rare-earth production then we're stupid not to recycle what we have.
Contrary to what the name implies, rare-earth metals actually aren't that rare. They are just found in very low concentrations, which means that refining them is energy-expensive and environmentally unfriendly. This is why most production takes place in China: they run coal-fired power plants (with lots of cheap coal to run them) and don't give a crap about the environment. We could refine rare-earth metals in the US or European Union from domestic ore supplies, but it would be much more expensive because the production would have to be compliant with worker safety and environmental protection standards. Should a true emergency situation arise, we could make ends meet.
The difference here is that you won't be required to make a new purchase. Many UK retailers will also dispose of your old stuff free if you buy something, although they're not required to.
We just need to recycle them. Think of the markets being created here for reclaiming technologies.
Lets look just at indium, a LCD screen component also a "rare earth". I'm having serious difficulty figuring out the "ore value" of indium. If anyone can do any better please post.
First of all lets not argue decimal places when I'm just trying to get a handle on orders of magnitude.
So Indium sells for about $200/pound. The cost has been cratering as the economy has collapsed (don't give me a quote for 2007, OK) Some site claimed the cost of indium to make a monitor is about 50 cents. So each monitor contains about 1/400th a pound of indium. Or if we assume a monitor weighs 10 pounds, the monitor recycling bin at my local health food store contains "ore" around 250 ppm
Some USGS website claims that pretty good indium ore (real ore, as in dug out of the ground) contains a couple ppm of indium. And the separation and refining process is extensive, complicate, elaborate, and expensive so you can't argue monitor recycling costs are worse.
So a recycle bin full of monitors, treated as an "ore" is a better source of indium than any mine on earth by about two orders of magnitude. That's before you recycle the copper, tin solder, aluminum frames, and plastic case.
Since we don't recycle LCDs for the indium, as far as I know, some numbers above must be wrong. Can anyone find the mistake?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes, I believe something like this has been place in Finland for quite a while. Many big computer stores do also receive and recycle electronics without cost already.
I am a Jobs-Creator and my new venture in the Congo will surely suffer due to this Communist legislation. Think of the little black employees!
Gabriel Mzungu,
senior VP Heart of Darkness Recycling Technologies
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Now I might be wrong here but memory serves that in Sweden the retailers are forced to accept a return of old equipment of the same kind when you purchase a new one.
Where I live if you sell oil you must accept returned oil. No charge, no asking for ID, no debate. They are allowed to whine and complain and try to convince you to buy stuff, but they are none the less legally required to accept oil. So yes, you can carry bottles of used motor oil to a 15-minute quick lube place, or a dealership, or service station, or even walmart, and demand they take it, and they will. Supposedly they can deny if you're "obviously" a business, so 4 quarts of 5w30 is obviously OK but I donno what happens if you walk in with multiple full 5 gallon buckets. Supposedly the amount of oil dumped in the environment has dropped to darn near zero since this was enacted decades ago. I haven't seen a oil sheen on the local river since I was a kid... so I tend to believe it.
Can a /.er verify for me if this is a state or federal law?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think your assumption that it must be "easier" to get the ore out of a monitor than a raw material is probably very false.
Indium in what form? How processed? Combined with what? Integrated into what component? It's used to form electrodes in LCD screens, but does that mean that each pixel has a coating of it three-or-four coatings deep? And only covering that pixel? How many pixels on the screen to deconstruct to get to that? How much per pixel versus much work? What if it's in a form that now requires more energy to separate it (e.g. rust contains iron and oxygen, but you don't see a market for your old rust)? What if it's next to and mixed with other chemicals that you can't filter without health hazards, or where your process has to sacrifice one for the other?
All things that wouldn't affect raw-ore refining (Who cares what happens to the other rock in the ore? Almost certainly indium will be found among heaps of junk that's easily dissolved in acid and then disposed of etc.).
It's also a bit like "uncooking" food. Yeah, my cake has eggs in it. You can try to take the eggs out after I've baked it if you like. The collatoral damage, energy, precision, processing and just sheer time involved mean that it's just not worth it.
Now if we're talking discrete components, e.g. a PCB track made of gold or copper, or a magnet in a hard drive, then you can just extract those components, burn the residue and get some value if the raw material is valuable enough. Like people stealing catalytic converters for their platinum. Who cares about what else is there, the platinum alone is easily extractable and worth the effort.
Just because it says "indium", it doesn't mean "raw indium, in the same format as it was dug out of the earth in." And, as you point out, even extracting from 1ppm is extensive, complicated, elaborate and expensive when you don't CARE about what else is in the rock and you're not paying for the rock. Just multiplying it up by even 250 doesn't mean it's any easier to extract than from the raw ore.
By the same token, extracting gold from seawater should be incredibly easy and profitable. It isn't. Because gold ore is much nicer to handle and extract. Just because it's "1ppm" doesn't even mean it's spread as dust throughout vast rock formation. It might meant just that you have to dig up a mountain to find one block of it in a lump (e.g. diamonds, gold, etc.)
In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World where they cause all kinds of environmental problems.
Even when some actual recycling is done, it is likely to make the impact on the environment worse, not better, than if it was just dumped in a landfill. See this article for some details (with photos) of how an electronics "recycling" operation in China threatens both the environment and worker safety. Of course, it's all about the Benjamins: "Sending a monitor to China costs about ten cents. Actually recycling it costs several dollars."
If the European Union wants this regulation to have a positive impact, they need to stipulate that the equipment be recycled locally under EU safety and environmental standards – not just exported to Ghana or China and down the memory hole.
it would be easier IF you could find a mountain of monitors stacked in a pile. then I'm sure it would be cheap and easy enough to take them with a truck to a separation line.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, but who would read Basic these days anyway? You should care more about the Python reading comprehension. :-)
The problem with recycling electronics is first that the process to remove the metals from the recycled oar will be different then getting the material from the ground, the cost to refine those materials is more expensive. It's no so simple to say just refine the precious metals from the pile of waste the refining process of one material might make refining the waste from another impossible so pulling out the gold and indium may not be possible. Then there are the environmental concerns too these products contain lead, arsenic, and mercury that must be handled properly along with the chemicals needed to refine the metals you have a lot of costs in managing the toxic chemicals. A material is only called oar if it can be mined and refined for a profit, it may well be that the electronics waste are considered oar for only one or two of the metals and that the waste from the 1st round of recycling has caused the material to no longer be considered oar.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Can anyone find the mistake?
LCDs are so 2008. Is there any indium in LED monitors?
With the exception of a couple of OLED smartphones, 'LED' monitors and TV sets *are* LCD. The 'LED' part is the backlight, instead of fluorescent tubes.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Yeah but you can go to your indium mine and extract 100 million tons of ore tomorrow. As opposed to monitors, where you need to collect each monitor and ship it to whatever processing plant on palates. Much worse economies of scale!
LCDs are so 2008. Is there any indium in LED monitors?
Indium "wets" glass so any screen with LCD pixel elements uses indium as some form of mask/plate/wiring. I'm not involved enough to know further details. Its not in the florescent tubes or LED or whatever your LCD screen uses for illumination. Even a reflective non-backlit display like an old fashioned wristwatch from the 80s would still have indium... I think.
From a marketing perspective LCDs with LEDs used to backlight seem to be marketed as "LED" whereas monitors using individual LEDs as pixels are marketed as "OLED" so a LED monitor uses indium but a OLED monitor probably does not.
Everything I've read about OLED is it really sucks, low res, short lifetime, UV fading, extreme cost. Maybe someday it'll be competitive and no one will use indum anymore.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Waste electrical and electronic equipment, or WEEE, is one the fastest growing waste streams in the EU, but currently only one-third of electrical and electronic waste is separately collected and appropriately treated.
The French had no arguments with this proposal, "Oui! We have been recycling our WEEE for some time now, and selling it to the Americans as 'eau de toilette.' We find this is a very profitable arrangement that also supports our sense of national pride. Now go away or I shall spray it on you a second time!"
He obviously didn't think what you said was clear enough and he chose to add to it. Your bulldog attitude and your lack of detail (also a communication problem) are why his post got +5 and yours stayed at 0. His is the one with the actual information in it, and the more correct opinion (that if we couldn't get the materials from china, we could always make them here). In short, I can understand your frustration, but it's completely misplaced. Finish your thought and you won't have that problem next time.
If someone doesn't come in the night and grab it (usually happens, there must be tons of dumpster divers in the NOLA area)...then, the garbage man conveniently hauls it away for me, and I have room to buy new stuff.
But seriously, I've almost never had an old computer or monitor (even the old, broken 21" Sun CRTs I used to have) ever last in the trash piled out front long enough for the trash guys to get. I guess you could call that a form of recycling.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So what we need to do is throw stuff into really large landfills until one day there's enough to mine (or the tech improves so that it's cheap enough, or things get expensive enough so that we're desperate enough)?
Yup. Most rare earth minerals came from the Mountain Pass mine in southern California, until the Chinese priced them almost out of the market in the 1990s.
Yup. Most rare earth minerals came from the Mountain Pass mine in southern California, until the Chinese priced them almost out of the market in the 1990s.
Then the Chinese raised their prices, and the Mountain Pass Mine reopened and is due to reach full production latter this year.
While true, that is because of level of life of average citizen as well as significant amount of people living in extreme poverty in China.
Pollution per production would be a far more fair assessment here, and in that regard China is unfortunately off-scale.
Pollution per production would be a far more fair assessment here, and in that regard China is unfortunately off-scale.
Not when you consider all the sources of pollution. A Chinese factory may emit more smoke than an American factory, but the American workers commute to the factory in 4 ton SUVs, while the Chinese workers arrive on bicycles.
Some estimates are that China has 95% of the world's rare earth metals on land,
I love factoids like this. Logically, it is almost certainly true, since "some estimates" can mean almost anything, while the underlying implication is complete nonsense (China has no where near 95% of economically viable rare earth ores).
Only $200/pound? Really? I was looking a few months ago and the price was still up around $800/kilo. If you can get a bead on that price and put it on the market you'd be doing pretty well. The ore value is much more difficult, because it depends on "what" it's coming from, and how much you need to work to get it a non-ore state. Just like you said. It's actually cheaper to get it during mining/refining production than it is to get it from recycling from everything I've learned the last few years. Getting it from recycling is just too bloody expensive, and would probably drive the price up around $2-4k/kilo.
To be honest, Indium isn't considered a rare earth in the metal markets, it's considered a minor metal with low demand(you don't need much of it, and when you do use it a little bit goes a long way), though I am a metal market newbie(only been playing it off and on for the last two years, I make my bread and butter in currencies). It's plentiful, and large amounts of are available in storage and on demand. But really, where there's iron or zinc mining, you can get indium. And two of the worlds largest sources of it are in Canada.
Om, nomnomnom...