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."

Comments

Perhaps stuff might last longer now

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bit of both. Electronics that will die one day after the warranty runs out but consist of otherwise usable parts that can be put in a shiny case and sold as new. Training consumers to give them back all the equipment when it fails is the next step in planned obsolescence; planned obsolescence AND RESALE.

Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now

[mcgrew]

No, this is a tax and thus is a net drain on society.

First, you believe all taxes are drains on society? You can't have government without revenue, and anarchy always leads to monarchy. Some things, like roads and bridges, are best done by governments and paid for by taxes. But this isn't a tax; a tax goes straight to government. This is no more a tax than my city mandating that I hire a private waste disposal company to take my garbage.

Morality can't be legislated, even if recycling is a good thing. This is nannying the general populous in a very large way

So, you're against murder, rape, and theft laws? Either I'm completely misunderstanding you, or you're insane. This isn't nannying any more than laws against dumping your oil in the river are. Marijuana laws, prostitution laws, sodomy laws -- victimless crimes -- are nannying. Environmental laws, like laws against other assaults, protect you from me.

When these companies can no longer compete with the rest of the world, they'll either move out of Europe or seek special favors from the EU politicians to help keep them afloat.

So, you'ld like London or Brussels to look like Mexico City? This is simply another environmental law. I wish they'd impliment it here in the US, I see it as a good law. As it is here, the onus is on the consumer to recycle the equipment. Your EU law puts the onus on the manufacturer (or possibly seller?). I have junk in my garage I'd love to throw away, but I'd have to cart it ten miles to the nort part of town.

Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now

[cpu6502]

>>>No, this is a tax and thus is a net drain on society. Morality can't be legislated, even if recycling is a good thing.

By that logic we shouldn't have filters on car exhausts, stop people from littering, or have centralized sewer disposal in cities. We should just let people live in filfth, like how Paris was circa 1800. (It is said that place was so full of manure and waste that visitors could Smell the city before they could see it.)

People have basic rights. Among those rights is the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water. That means forbidding people from polluting & violating those basic rights. The government is simply doing its job to stop these violations of individual rights.

As for "shipping jobs overseas" there would be no advantage. Chinese companies if they want to operate in the EU also must abide by these recycling rules. Else they will be barred from entering & selling to ~500 million citizens.

Re:All our resources are still here

[JDG1980]

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.

Re:All our resources are still here

[vlm]

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?

Indeed

[MRe_nl]

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

Re:All our resources are still here

[ledow]

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.)

Re:All our resources are still here

[fridaynightsmoke]

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.

Re:All our resources are still here

[vlm]

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.

Re:All our resources are still here

[ShanghaiBill]

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.