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A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Forty percent of all U.S. electronics recyclers testers included in [a study that used GPS trackers to follow e-waste over the course of two years] proved to be complete shams, with our e-waste getting shipped wholesale to landfills in Hong Kong, China, and developing nations in Africa and Asia. The most important thing to know about the e-waste recycling industry is that it is not free to recycle an old computer or an old CRT television. The value of the raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics is worth less than it costs to actually recycle them. While consumers rarely have to pay e-waste recycling companies to take their old electronics (costs are offset by local tax money or manufacturers fronting the bill as part of a legally mandated obligated recycling quota), companies, governments, and organizations do. Based on the results of a new study from industry watchdog Basel Action Network and MIT, industry documents obtained by Motherboard, and interviews with industry insiders, it's clear that the e-waste recycling industry is filled with sham operations profiting off of shipping toxic waste to developing nations. Here are the major findings of the study and of my interviews and reporting: Real, environmentally sustainable electronics recycling can be profitable only if recycling companies charge a fee to take on old machines; the sale of recycled materials rarely if ever covers the actual cost of recycling in the United States. Companies, governments, and other organizations have a requirement to recycle old machines; because there is little oversight or enforcement, a secondary industry of fake recyclers has popped up to undercut sustainable recyclers. These "recyclers," which advertise themselves as green and sustainable, get paid pennies per pound to take in old TVs, computers, printers, and monitors. Rather than recycle them domestically, the recycling companies sell them to junkyards in developing nations, either through middlemen or directly. These foreign junkyards hire low-wage employees to pick through the few valuable components of often toxic old machines. The toxic machines are then left in the scrapyards or dumped nearby. Using GPS trackers, industry watchdog Basel Action Network found that 40 percent of electronics recyclers it tested in the United States fall into this "scam recycling" category.
We apologise for the faults in the summary. Those responsible have been sacked.
Seriously, the ONLY way to solve this, is for us to stop allowing ANY garbage to be exported. Then capitalism will find solutions rather quickly. Most importantly, it will help bring back manufacturing since we will then have resources that need to be used, and can not be exported.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I always debated this with people that think that everything must be digital because "dead-tree stuff is bad and will kill our planet (tm)". Come on! First trees are renewable and I prefer having papers and books in a landfield than laptop, cell, TV, batteries, ... Don't get me wrong. I work in IT for 21 years and I love it, but the problem is that people change their e-stuffs almost every year because their e-stuffs became obsolete, slow like hell because the latest OS updates (I'm talking to you Apple and Microsoft), ...
PS: Sorry for my English quality.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
Disclaimer: we build GPS trackers.
You don't need a very big battery. You just power down for most of the time. Wake up once in a while (daily or even less). Try to get a connection. No connection? Probably at sea, so power down. Keep trying until you get a connection and update your location. You don't need to know the exact route - just the starting point and the end point (maybe a few extra once you are on land again). It really doesn't need a huge battery at all; the one they show in the picture even seem rather large for this.
To give you an idea, we can send thousands of GPS locations over a cellular network with a tiny 1000mAh battery. We have some heavy duty batteries that can go up to 10 times that capacity to actively track assets for months on end at very frequent intervals. Putting a 10Ah battery like that and using infrequent updates can last for a year easily.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp