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Some Recyclers Give Up On Recycling Old Monitors And TVs (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
"In many cases, your old TV isn't recycled at all and is instead abandoned in a warehouse somewhere, left for society to deal with sometime in the future," reports Motherboard, describing the problem of old cathode-ray televisions and computer monitors with "a net negative recycling value" (since their component parts don't cover the cost of dismantling them). An estimated 705 million CRT TVs were sold in the U.S. since 1980, and many now sit in television graveyards, "an environmental and economic disaster with no clear solution." As much as 100,000 tons of potentially hazardous waste are stockpiled in two Ohio warehouses of the now-insolvent recycler Closed Loop, plus "at least 25,000 tons of glass and unprocessed CRTs in Arizona...much of it is sitting in a mountainous pile outside one of the warehouses."
One EPA report found 23,000 tons of lead-containing CRT glass abandoned in four different states just in 2013.
One EPA report found 23,000 tons of lead-containing CRT glass abandoned in four different states just in 2013.
I take my old monitors (CRT and LCD alike) to a place where I pay a somewhat hefty fee to recycle (I think around $20-$40). That's the best I can do to ensure they actually will be recycled, rather than taking it somewhere that supposedly would handle them for free... I do the same for pretty much any electronic device.
I know that's no guarantee but you do the best you can. Besides, even a warehouse full of dead monitors that will basically just sit forever is still a way better scenario than having them polluting a landfill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Chuck it all in the Grand Canyon. Plenty of room in there, believe me folks, it's yuuuuge.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and drop em in to molten lava at that volcano since it is hot enough to melt even glass & metal that way there wont be nothing left even the toxic material will be burnt and encapsulated with lava rock when it cools
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This talk of mountains of leaded glass seems like no problem, unless leaded glass leaches a lot. If nothing else it might be a "lead mine" if and when the price of lead goes up.
So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass, and ditto the prices for the other elements in the CRTs (I assume the copper wiring got ripped out right away), then oh fucking well. Invisible hand at work - just need to make sure the storage of the CRTs is adequate to contain the toxic lead.
And yeah, maybe 200 years from now we'll have mined out all the surface lead and it'll be worth recycling them properly. Or maybe just 20 years from now we'll develop robotic disassemblers (with good manipulators and machine vision that can actually properly see and grab stuff and figure out which part of the TV it's looking at like a human worker would) that can economically take these things apart for the goodies inside for less than mining the same elements fresh.
The main issue here is a failure for society to properly bill the costs for proper storage of this stuff. Or maybe they should just for residential landfill operators to make the landfills capable of accepting CRT and other waste, since realistically that's what most people are going to do with their broken electronics.
six years ago, a group of college students (for class credit) followed a CRT TV (GPS unit embedded ) from recycle bin to its final destination. it was never recycled since the GPS continued to work. they lost the signal after it left San Juan when it was sent outside the USA.
One serious use is as 'practice victims' for beginning newbies to electronics to play with, as practice in the dextrous tasks of dismantling, identifying, etc, and in the fun you can have in reusing what works. Playing with broke stuff frees you from the risk of expensive mistakes.
John_Chalisque
If someone finds a viable way to recycle these things, then it still only viable because there are a lot of them concentrated in a single place.
Well, if they're not filling it with radioactive waste, why not store other junk in the caves at Yucca Mountain?
A volunteer can easily tear apart 4 of these per hour if given proper training, tools, and work area. I am pretty sure if the labor cost of separating out glass, boards, copper, and other components were zero, then the net return would no longer be negative. And there are plenty of people who need to clock some verified community service and/or other volunteer time; and hundreds of times more people who want to do it just to feel good about themselves.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Glass is an amorphous solid that is porous if you look under an electron microscope. It slowly dissolves in water (very slowly) and therefore continuously leaches whatever compounds it is composed of. It probably wouldn't be a big problem for local water if you dumped a few big CRT TVs here and there, but if you put a mountain of it somewhere and let it leach into the soil, it could get into the local groundwater. Look, if we want capitalism to survive and not destroy us and the planet while people are making a buck, we need to clean up after ourselves. You don't crap on the living room rug.
Here is my lab's journal article on glass leaching:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Repair manuals occur only in user-serviceable animals.
One problem adding to the debris-littered future you (accurately) describe is that the corporate advantages of proprietisation, miniaturisation, and planned obsolescence have convened to create a profit model with a steadfast tenet: do not make ANYTHING user-serviceable.
From vacuum cleaners, to power drills, to phones and everything else in between and surrounding, nothing is made user serviceable any more. Try opening up one of the latest mostly-plastic vacuum cleaners. Many of them are made to be snapped together during assembly and not to come back apart, ever. Even routine cleaning is a huge hassle, especially with components that can't be opened up. And power drills, don't get me started. There are power drills from WW2 that still run perfectly even if the brushes haven't been oiled in 20 years. You can open the up and clean, repair, or replace every last component. Some of the components can even be hand-built in the garage or machine tool shop. Try to find that level of performance or serviceability in modern power drills.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Some of use retro computer enthusiasts actually collect and will pay money for CRTs and monitors. Of course they have to be certain kinds, but there's gold in some of them dar monitors. A high quality CRT will also fetch some decent money.
This is one of the times I think the EPA could do a lot of good by picking a site out west, setting up a furnace and simply grinding and melting these down to then refine out the lead and other metals. They should run it themselves, not contracting it out, and accept all CRTs and e-waste that make it to the loading dock, for free, no questions asked.
I have disposed of tons of monitors over the years, all with WEEE-compliant disposal agents.
One of them told me that they get paid a pound (British) each to take them to Heathrow. They are loaded on a plane. A guy from a company in India / Asia signs them off and gives them the money. He then pays to ship them out to Asia.
The ONLY way that can be profitable, is for them to be landfilled in a country that doesn't care about what they are landfilling.
On my end, I have all the paperwork, so I have disposed of them "ethically". So has the guy with the van that he takes to Heathrow loaded with monitors every week. And he takes any boxes of cables, which he tells me the copper - melted down - pays for his fuel. Otherwise he wouldn't make profit himself.
I imagine your goodwill store are doing the same, they just don't know it.
Honestly - what possible use is an old, broken CRT monitor? None. That's why we've been throwing them away for decades rather than try to repair them. Even if you look into what's in them, there are no profitable parts you can extract while still being environmentally-friendly (sure, if you don't give a shit about the kids handling rare earth metals to get at tiny slivers of precious metals, then it all "works").
You've been fed a line. But for the last 15 years I've not heard anything but the same thing from all the different people who come to collect our e-waste, all of whom sign off, all of whom get their thing signed-off, but nobody knows what happens to the end product as it goes abroad (at HUGE expense if you consider cargo rates and handling on tons of monitors).
There are numerous studies that put GPS trackers in e-waste. Almost without exception they end up abroad and in landfill.
Whether it's you, the goodwill store, Dell, their disposal company, or the people they use doing that "knowingly" it's almost impossible to tell. But you're aren't doing shit for the planet, I assure you.
There IS no place that disposes of CRTs for free.
From time to time there are collection drives that take in some kind of hard to recycle material for free, from time to time there are ones that take TV sets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because the monitors by themselves aren't enough or an environmental hazard, so you feel an entire ship should be dumped into the ocean along with them?
Try to find that level of performance or serviceability in modern power drills.
If you're willing to pay extra for the big funky chunky pro level stuff from Milwaukee or whoever, they all are designed for the user to replace the brushes and the chuck. If not, then it's still generally possible, but a PITA. With those cheap drills, the gears will wear out anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why does you paying them make them more honest?
I don't, nor did I say so. Please read my post again.
How much fuel do you burn driving there and back?
As much as I would taking the monitor to any other place that would have taken them. I try to do electronics in a batch. But honestly you are missing the point entirely by saying anything about fuel use, which is a totally different vector than recycling. I don't care how much fuel I burn for anything (except of course for the cost of it which is real).
Like most recycling, this seems to be more about "feeling good" rather than actually helping the environment.
No it's exactly unlike feeling good. I take it to a place I think offers the greatest percentage of the monitor no ending up in a river somewhere which is good for no-one.
Except for all the resources that went into building the warehouse.
Irrelevant comment; see my comment re: fuel. Resources do not matter as much as residual pollution does.
Do you know how much CO2 is generated to make concrete?
Again, not relevant since CO2 is not pollution and the argument against CO2 is a totally different one than against real pollution. Nature loves and uses CO2 (do you even know how plants live???)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ahhh, how I love the smell of Virtue Signalling in the morning!
I hate virtue signaling as well. This is not an example of that; it is merely to point out that if you may to recycle some of the worst items you increase the odds they will be handled correctly, if you cheap out you may end up with the thing you are trying to keep out of the environment actually end up somewhere really bad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Either you tax products made of un-recycled parts up to the point that recycling becomes profitable, or you publicly fund free recycling. We see a lot more of the latter, but I'd prefer the former approach -- a lot of people won't bother to recycle for free but will bother to recycle if businesses are offering them money for it.
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I just put mine in a cardboard box with a random address on it and taped up to look like it's brand new, valuable and awaiting pickup by a courier or freight company -- and then leave it on the street outside my house.
Within hours -- it's gone.
Then it's the thief's problem :-)
I replaced my 12-year-old 26" CRT TV with a 48" 4K HDTV that I got from Costco for $350 this past holiday season. I'm waiting for my apartment complex to have its semi-annual recycle weekend to drop off the CRT. According to the flyer, the recycler accept mainframes. I have yet to seen anyone turn in a mainframe.
I'm a professional CRT recycler with experience with the companies in the article. The leaded silicate in CRT glass can actually be valuable as a fluxing agent. It's basically the same as anglesite, the leaded quartz that's mined worldwide. But because of e-waste alarmism (e.g. original article said they were full of "toxic gases", still says the CRTs "explode"), the primary copper and lead smelting industries stopped accepting the material. I personally managed several hundred tons of cullet from one on the companies in the article, but the smelter didn't like the regulators and environmentalists poking around, or the red tape. So they went back to mining lead and silica from the ground. Here's an article I wrote about the "no good deed goes unpunished" aspects of CRT glass recycling. resource-recycling.com/pdfs/Ingenthron0316e.pdf Previously I wrote one - also published in Motherboard - about how Asian refurbishers stopped buying CRTs from America for the same reason (they were being cast as "primitive wire burners). motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/26/e-waste-recycling-exports-are-good
A good rule of thumb is that the worst forms of recycling are better for the environment than the best forms of hard rock metal mining. But "waste" policy says the opposite, waste is a "liability" for the consuming industry, mined material is subsidized.
Gently reply
In the EU, the vendors, merchants, and manufacturers are required by law to take that stuff back and give proof of proper professional recycling. Any store that sells such devices is required to take any device (no matter if it was bought there or not) back for recycling, no questions asked and no fees allowed. Sure, cost of new devices might increase a bit, but not as much given that there is still plenty of competition. It compels manufacturers also to design and build devices in such a way that they are easy and cheap to recycle. Plus, in the EU such devices have a minimum of 2 years manufacturer warranty....unlike the US where stuff is made only as good as necessary to circumvent lemon laws.
Pick it all up, and deliver to:
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, USA
to be fair, believing that glass is water soluble and believing in majic probably do go hand in hand.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I wonder if a future civilization will find the landfills and consider them treasures?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The lead isn't going to leak out of these things. It's essentially inert.
The demand just isn't there. Same with scrap metal. My local scrap metal place doesn't pay anything for scrap steel anymore.
The Iraq war created a lot of demand for scrap steel.
You'd think that lead recycling would be in demand given that the last US lead smelter closed in 2013 but perhaps manufactured products using lead are all made overseas.
Actually, no. at a pound a monitor he would be losing a LOT of money flying them out, which should be clear to you if you think about it.
What he was actually doing was flying them over there and telling them to people to use, you know, on computers, because they will
happily continue to be useful far in to the future (and in fact tend to have a better lifespan than modern flatscreens).
Just because YOU dont want functional electronics, doesnt mean no one wants them. It is in fact the BEST form of recycling.
In 100 years - hell, maybe 50 years - we'll have swarms of nanobots that will burrow into these landfills and re-mine them back into their original materials. Landfills will cease to be places no one wants; vast legal battles will ensue as municipalities fight with states and the feds over ownership of the contents. Just think of the amount of raw material that will one day be harvested from the Los Angeles landfill! Literally trillions of dollars is buried in our backyards, for future generations to reap. Don't think of it as a landfill, think of it as the fridge out back - we're just saving it for later use. In the end, all of it will be recycled.
Similar to the End of Life Vehicles Directive in the EU, Similar to the German End-of-Life Vehicles Act of 2002 (extended from a similar law in 1997). Manufacturers are responsible for recycling their vehicle at the vehicles end of life, this means manufacturers design their cars to be more easily recycled and means any overhead costs are built into the cost of the car up-front. There is no good reason that this shouldn't be the case for any larger or common products, why should the cost of recycling be deferred until the product has reached end of life, no consumer will pay more money to have their product recycled *after* it is useless.
I thought it went without saying that "free" meant free to me...
Even the place I pay for recycling is subsidized by government funds to recycle the stuff. But an extra payment on top of that, just as with any bribe, helps insure better service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Glass is water-soluble. That's why supply houses sell distilled water in plastic jugs. http://www.chemworld.com/ChemW...
That's why the F.D.A. recommends against using lead glass containers for long-term storage. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02...
Yep, any monitor that does 15KHz (TV sync) analog RGB is quite desirable to retro-gamers, particularly for use with '90s stuff. Note that most VGA monitors did not support TV sync rates, and CGA monitors generally did not support analog RGB. Also, consumer TVs that support analog HD use YPrPb color, not RGB.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
There's nothing like the 36" Sony flat screen glass televisions.
186 lbs. of pure video goodness.
I saw a few of those smashed at the dump after the bulldozer went through them. That's about the only thing that could cause any damage to those.
To hold the atmospheric pressure on the flat screen over such a large area, the glass is about an inch thick.
Those things will be around long after cockroaches are extinct.
Glass is a term that describes a wide range of materials. The most common glass is primarily silicon dioxide (quartz), which is not noticeably water soluble. It's impurities and glass formulations with other chemicals deliberately included that may result in water solubility.
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What do you think the recycler does with them?
I have no way of knowing.
I do know that if I put a monitor in the trash it's going into the landfill with a 100% probability.
If I take it to some some cheap or free place I know there's a pretty good chance it will go into a hellhole in some other country to decay and pollute everything.
If I take it to the place I pay a decent fee there's the highest probability that something as good as possible may be done with it. That probability will never be 100%. But pay paying a reasonable fee I maximize that probability.
Is your answer truly to just give up and not even try because you cannot know?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can throw it into the river yourself. Then you are guaranteed it is NOT recycled.
Part of what I do as a hobby is take disgusting trash out of rivers and throw it away in a more appropriate way...
If I saw a monitor in a river then in fact I would pull out the thing and take it to a recycler myself.
This is not out of any love of nature as it would not cause that much harm on its won just sitting there slowly decaying, purely aesthetics.
So even there you cannot be sure of what will happen to the monitor.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
True that landfills are pretty good ways to keep even dangerous trash long-term. But there are two good reasons to recycle some things anyway:
1) Bulk. Nice not have to have create a new giant clay pit, so try to fill up the existing one as slowly as possible. Especially CRT's are very bulky.
2) Easier access to rare materials. It's nice to be able to reuse various materials from electronics that are either somewhat rare or expensive to obtain. Of course the process of extraction when not done right creates a whole lot of really nasty pollution so you have to be careful making that choice. That is again why I prefer to pay more for a process that is probably not sending the electronics somewhere that will create even worse pollution than just dropping it into a landfill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All the motor brushes I've ever seen are graphite-based, and graphite is the lubricant. Grease the gears, oil or grease the bearings, fine. Oiling brushes puts an insulator in the electrical path and risks a small fire.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
High lead concrete is a very poor idea. Concrete in roads wears, and the resultant dust is kicked into the air by cars and runs off into the soil when it rains.
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The russians recently built a large concrete containment building and wheeled it into place over the ruins of Chernobyl's reactor, the Japanese must be thinking of doing something similar. I would have thought that crushed leaded glass would be a reasonable concrete ingredient, use it to build a containment shield around every reactor.
Nullius in verba
Air freight is expensive. What more likely happened was the agent at Heathrow loaded the monitors into a truck, drove them to a seaport, and transferred them to a ship. From there, whether they were dumped mid-ocean or ended up somewhere in particular is anybody's guess.
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listen I dont want poison drinking water, but where do you think this shit comes from, uranus?
lets not put lead back into the enviroment we mined millions of tons of the shit from?
omg
I'm not sure what the problem is, really. Let them sit in warehouses forever. At worst the state won't get tax revenue because no one will want the land/warehouses, but eventually it will become economical and some entrepreneur will go in and dismantle the CRTs for their minerals. It is not like they are going to contaminate the water table with lead or phosphor sitting in a warehouse.
One thing that people tend to forget is that all these minerals came out of the ground to begin with, and there are plenty of places (like the desert) where you can safely bury trash literally forever. Where trash becomes a problem is where you have a high or mobile water table or lots of rainfall to carry water mobile chemicals into the water table. Burying e-waste in the middle of the desert is like burying your cell phone in the sand of your lizard's terrarium. In 10 years it will be virtually unchanged (assuming you bury the e-waste deep enough).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
In terms of "melted down for parts" they probably aren't worth much, but how about the actual capacitors etc when removed and re-used. Old CRT's had some badass (and deadly) capacitors. I've been tempted to see about harvesting them for other purposes, except the badass part means that even years after the last use they can zap you but good.
What do they do in prisons now? Pick oakum?
You may be able to sink my CRT laden ships, but you can't sink my virtue!
First of all, normal glass does have lots of ionic impurities. This lowers the melting temperature to something affordable. Even normal lab glass is this way, though less so and with different impurities. The pure stuff is called "fused silica". Fused silica is really expensive. It's normally used for IR and UV optical stuff, gravity wave detectors, cruciables, and... pretty much nothing else.
Even ignoring the impurities, glass itself is sort of ionic. In a lab, you can make it hydrophobic or hydrophilic by stripping off some silicon or oxygen atoms with an acid or base. Strong bases will noticably eat away at glass. Water itself is not perfectly covalent; there is a Kw (K sub w) constant for the dissociation of water. It is from this that the pH and pOH of pure water is about 7. Both pH and pOH rise with temperature because Kw rises with temperature. This could be interpreted as water becoming "more base" and "more acid" at the same time as the temperature goes up. Now remember that strong bases noticably eat away at glass. Water isn't sitting there calmly; it is a more dynamic system of both acid and base in balance. Water will thus slowly pick atoms off the surface of the glass.
That depends entirely on what you buy. Cheap DIY power tools are made to work for a couple of years and then be thrown away. The more expensive stuff from Metabo, Bosch Professional, Hilti, Fein, Festool, etc. will probably last much longer than the average drill made around WW2 and while not as serviceable, it will need far less service, too.
We tend to overestimate the quality of old products due to our experiences being influenced by survivership bias and the ubiquity of cheaper alternatives that didn't exist when the old things we compare against were made. Of course, product designs tend to be optimised increasingly for low cost, low weight and efficient assembly rather than repeated service. Partly, this is a consequence of a throwaway society, but it is in no small part due to the fact that devices simply need less servicing. New technology, better designs and better manufacturing (tighter tolerances, better materials, etc.) can often make many of the procedures that older tools (or other devices) needed unnecessary within the lifetime of the product. A few of the power tools from the good old days still exist and work today. However, the majority has been thrown away, as they failed anyway or because the advantages of newer alternatives outweighed the disadvantages. Newer things may not always be better, but quite often they really are.
Bullshit. MIT tracking study found only 14% of CRTs were exported, and most of those were found in reuse operations. And they didn't even track any large CRT TVs (only small monitors) which haven't had much of an export market for a decade. The NGOs who made up this story about "primitive" tech sector have a uniqure role, raising millions with pictures of kids at foreign dumps, but not actually sharing a single penny with the people in the photos - instead driving it into these warehouses. I'm a lifelong environmentalist, but the NGO's "CRT e-waste policy" was a sever case of malpractice, planned obsolescence, and racial profiling.
Gently reply
They'll consider them treasure troves of information alright. Information on how bloody stupid the people who created these things were.
Place a deposit on all good sold equal to the current cost of proper disposal at net present for the estimated life of the product. The manufacturer has to take the product back and dispose of it at end of life but in return they get an interest free loan for the life of the product. THis shifts the burden to the designers and rewards them for making a easy to dispose of product and rewards them for making it not disposable. The float is how Warren Buffet got rich FYI.
Which is why the crime rate has dropped 60% since the early 90s: because we stopped exposing all of our kids to chronic lead poisoning.
I imagine that if a typical old monitor is approximately 50cm * 50cm * 50 cm, then you can fit about 1 billion of them into a hole in the ground that is approximately 500m * 500m * 500m.
This isn't to suggest that waste that is currently unrecycleable is a good thing, but this is a problem that can be managed by having a plan to deal with the issue.
Ha! good snark.
Back to my point...
"
A midden (also kitchen midden or shell heap; from early Scandinavian; Danish: mødding, Swedish regional: mödding)[1] is an old dump for domestic waste[2] which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, vermin shells, sherds, lithics (especially debitage), and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.
These features, therefore, provide a useful resource for archaeologists who wish to study the diet and habits of past societies.
"
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Where does styrofoam go?
Into a glass container of gasoline. To make 'kiddy napalm'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
a warehouse full of dead monitors that will basically just sit forever is still a way better scenario than having them polluting a landfill.
How did SuperKendall arrive at that conclusion?
In a deep landfill, a given quantity of CRTs will occupy much less land area than in a one-story warehouse. Furthermore, lead can't leach out of a properly-constructed landfill that is lined with clay. The same can't be said for an unwanted, unmaintained warehouse whose roof will eventually leak.
A warehouse indefinitely full of CRTs is a real estate asset that can no longer be used for productive purposes, and whose value has become negative (the owner would have to pay someone to take it off their hands, because of the massive expense of disposing of the CRTs). As its assessed value is negative, it will not generate any tax revenue for the local school district or other government entities.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Which situation is more likely to lead to lead leaching into groundwater?
(a) CRTs stored in an abandoned warehouse, whose roof will eventually leak
(b) CRTs in a properly-constructed, lined landfill
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
They are loaded on a plane.
That's very surprising.
A pallet of CRTs is damn heavy, and shipping heavy items by air is vastly more expensive than shipping them by rail or container ship. (The Chunnel made rail shipment in/out of the UK a viable option.)
Air-freighting heavy items is only done if you're in a hurry to get them to their destination. Who's in a hurry to get these CRTs into their landfill?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Repair manuals won't help with mobile phones. They're rarely thrown away because of hardware issues. It's far more likely that they will be thrown away because they are no longer getting software updates. In the case of iOS and some Android devices, a locked bootloader prevents third parties from supporting them, in the case of most Android devices there's no financial incentive for longer-term support so no one does. For example, I have an old HTC Desire that still works fine. It's a bit underpowered, but still runs a lot of modern Android apps. Unfortunately, the last CyanogenMod build for it is based on Android 2.3, which includes an old TLS stack that only supports versions of the protocol and cypher suites that are now not supported by servers because of known vulnerabilities. This means that it can't connect to any HTTPS URL, for example. I can install F-Droid on it, but F-Droid can't fetch the repositories over HTTPS. I can side-load applications, and as long as they don't use TLS (or ship their own TLS implementation), they work fine. It probably has several other known vulnerabilities though.
At least with CRTs, replacing them with a modern LCD will cut the power consumption by a huge amount (20-50W, vs 100+W), so there's a good reason for using the newer technology. A 7-year-old Android phone is about as capable as a low-end budget phone now, yet became effectively unusable after about 4 years of life.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Option C: recycle, even if it is not cost effective. Lined landfills can also eventually leak. Overstuffed warehouses and lined landfills also cost money, so just do it the right way. Someone needs to invent a system that can chop up all modern electronics and melt it all down and sort out the different materials for reuse. But since that probably isn't practical, just pass a law that all electronics are a) repairable, preferably with replaceable modules, and b) easy to recycle when no longer worth repairing.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.