Electronic Retailers In Europe Now Required To Take Back Old Goods 162
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."
Perhaps stuff might last longer now (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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BTW when my stuff does eventually die, I dispose of it through selling on ebay. There's always someone who is a hacker who wants to either repair it to restore functionality, or use it for parts.
And also: I thought the EU Parliament does not pass laws? The summary calls this a "law" but Europeans on /. always claim the EU does not have that power. Only the States can pass laws. (confuseD)
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I suspect only 1% or less of products get recycled that way by having someone else repair it. Most of the products are trashed instead.
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Also, the headline says "Europe", and there are still many European countries that are not members of the EU.
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I believe that would require a lot more standardization and designing for reusabilty than what is common today.
I'm one of those guys who like to tinker with old electronics, and what I get to see is a wild jumble of one-off designs that are made to fit one particular device, but have little chance of fitting into next year's model.
There is one notable exception. The computer industry (in particular desktop parts) has mostly exchangable parts, and except for stuff getting obsolete, many parts could in fact b
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I've worked for a number of companies who used to design their own circuit boards. As memory chips tended to "fry" under testing conditions, everyone tried to grab as many as they could. So old PC's were cannabalized of useful bits before they went to the recycling center. When somebody left, the vultures would circle, gather round their desk picking and making off with cables, memory chips and manuals.
Even my last university would pre-salvage all damaged PC's being sent back to Dell. Whatever working parts
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"If manufacturers have to go to the trouble of recycling their goods they might be tempted to make them more reliable"
How is this logical? State mandated processing of waste will be taken as a cost and passed on to the consumer, like it always is. Why do you believe this legislation will somehow change the fundamentals of economics?
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Why do you feel, as a consumer, that you wouldn't have to pay for it?, if you're the one using the product, why wouldn't you be responsible for the entire lifecycle of the product?
There's one point where we have to start to understand that we need to make responsible use of what we buy. Products should be much more expensive and durable, and should be manufactured and dumped responsibly.
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"Wouldn't this make the long-term profit on more durable items larger?"
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. This is nannying the general populous in a very large way and will result in more special treatment for special interests. 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. This happens again, a
Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now (Score:4, Interesting)
"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."
If the rules apply to all companies why shouldn't they be able to compete? Or are you suggesting that all companies are going to suddenly stop selling all electronics in europe?
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It is only the retailers in europe which are directly affected and retailers have to be where their customers are. But the EU is a big enough market to influence manufacturers on the whole earth. When the EU finally banned various hazardous substances in electronics after a long transition period practically every electronics components or device manufacturer was forced to offer rohs compliant products. For many components or devices due to economics of scale and logistics it is cheaper to only offer a rohs compliant product worldwide than a compliant one for europe and a slightly cheaper traditional variant for the rest of the world.
That doesn't justify what the EU does. If the EU imposes a law (hypothetical law) that says all companies must hire 100 women to every man hired, that doesn't make it right even when companies around the world start having to do that same practice to do business in the EU. Just because something appears to be moral and then enacted through a law doesn't make it so. There are still plenty of people who disagree on the morality of any given subject, and to force them to do something they don't want to do on a
Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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ah, I remember a time when I could make a nice response like that..but these days I have no patience for those morons who have no really clue and thing taxed money somehow disappears.
Re:Perhaps stuff might last longer now (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>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.
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In the Libertarian True Believer world, living in a world full of trash and pollution and sick citizens is a utopia as long as there are no regulations or taxes.
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"No, this is a tax and thus is a net drain on society"
No. A tax is not a net drain. Unless that tax money is put in a pile and burned.
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Yep.. that is EXACTLY what is happening in the U.S. and Europe. No differences there. None at all.
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NO it isn't, please get the fuck out of your echo chamber.
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1. Money that is not taxed pays for "shit" that benefits a lot of people too. What does this have to do with anything? In addition there is no organization less efficient, more corrupt and more wasteful than a government. When you are spending money that you have to work for you have an incentive to make wise purchases and not waste your money. When you are spending money confiscated from someone else it's very easy to be wasteful as you can go out anytime and confiscate more.
2. Wikipedia is not an au
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I have to reply to #7. The idea that getting enough people together to get a certain "majority" of a vote to enact something doesn't make it moral or just. It doesn't make it wise, nor does it make it good. It just means, some people want something, and they're too lazy to enact change through their personal spheres of influence (i.e. their daily relationships). No corporations are not people, but they are made up of people, just like governments are. However, here's the key differences. Assuming that a com
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I fail to see how any of this leads to 'long-term profit on more durable items larger'.
It's not a guarantee, but consider the following two scenarios:
1) You own a business selling cheaply made electro-widget for price $X. New law gets passed mandating that you must bear costs of recycling. So you figure out, based on predicted lifetime of your widget, the steady-state recycling costs will be $A per widget. So you increase the price of your widget to be $Y = $X+$A, all the while maintaining the same cheap
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Nowadays a lot of stuff that used to last longer, no longer last as long even though they are the same brand, and sometimes even look the same as the old stuff.
I've a bunch of Byford socks that are still usable after 20 years (they're a bit thinner now, but no holes, and the elastic stuff is still fine), and I've 1 year old Byford socks that are lo
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"If the manufacturer has the burden of paying that cost and they have to build it into the price, then devices that will last longer can be priced lower and better quality devices will be able to compete"
Excuse me, you are just re-stating the OP statement that "If manufacturers have to go to the trouble of recycling their goods they might be tempted to make them more reliable", so again I ask how is this logical?
The state is not incentivizing efficiency, it is simply adding a cost to production. That is all.
The cost is there, regardless, and the consumer will pay most of it in various ways. If the manufacturer has to pay it up front, there's at least some incentive to make it more efficient from the start, since there's only so much you can pass on before people start complaining.
On the other hand, the traditional way, where factories spew out goods and someone else ends up paying for the waste disposal and/or toxic waste cleanup doesn't give the manufacturer any incentive. So unless you get "free" garbage col
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But already for many years similar legislation has been in place in a couple of EU member states and I've yet to see a turning of the curve to more sustainable equipment.
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alternatively make them easier to recycle. If the components weren't a complete mismash of every type of rare metal known to man, they might be a lot easier to melt down and reuse.
There are a lot of places [emrgroup.com] that you can drop off metals for recycling - metal recycling rates are so high I can take an old copper heatsink (from a 1U server) and get £4 for it's scrap value. Steel chassis and parts are also valuable. Its the cost of recycling the circuit boards that has a negative value, so you don't g
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Its the cost of recycling the circuit boards that has a negative value, so you don't get to drop an appliance off and receive a bit of cash.
Electronic appliances, yes. For some weird reason the local scrappers would pick up an old/broken kitchen oven and give you $25, at least that was the case a couple years ago. All other appliances were merely picked up for free. So buy a new "whatever", put the old one out, make a call, and in a couple hours or less a truck picks it up and hauls it away for free.
If you own a $50K pickup truck that gets 8 MPG you can load the appliance in the truck bed and deliver it yourself for a couple bucks, but its a
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Isn't there some left coast electronics store famous for taking broken returned items and putting them back on the shelf for resale?
I find it extremely likely that if you return a "broken" TV someone else will be buying it. Maybe as a "display model" as-is for 5% off.
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In my experience, if an item fails during the warranty period (which is quite long, by law, in the UK) the company will replace it very quickly, often with a refurbished item. Presumably, they then attempt to fix what you send them.
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Pay your labor force pennies, and buy the cheapest possible crap capacitor... and you'll get your replacement costs down to a few nickels.
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>>>10K TVs that died 1 day after their warranty
Ya know..... I've heard this complaint my whole life. Yes people have been complaining, "They don't make things like they used to" for decades. And yet I have a Sears TV built in the 70s that still works.
A Panasonic 80s radio that still works (though the cassette player runs too slow). An XP-PC that is ten years old and still runs. A N64 that still plays games. A PS2 that is eleven years old and still plays games. A cellphone I bought in 1999 tha
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I agree here. Too many companies treat their products as disposable. Especially Apple which goes out of its way to make their cult followers throw away their gadgets in less than a year, or purchase a new replacement if the battery dies, or have them "recycled" where they get sent to poor countries to be broken apart and put into landfills.
Good news everybody (Score:3)
This is a really important step forward for the environment.
this has been in effect for years in Belgium (Score:2, Informative)
apples and oranges? (Score:2)
Environment fee is not the same thing, though both apples and oranges are fruit.
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How is this the same? This bill is forcing retailers to accept your old equipment for recycling. As in, you have an old laptop that works or doesn't work, you want to throw it out. Now you can take it to the retailer and deposit it there. Environment fee is not the same thing, though both apples and oranges are fruit.
Correct. And since they can't legally charge to accept your old equipment they add a fee on to the new equipment they sell. Sounds like apples to apples (or PCs to PCs) to me.
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retailers have been forced in most areas of eu to already take your old equipment and gather a fee associated with that..
you have been able to dump your old electronics at any electronics store in finland for the past.. dunno, 10+ years.
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It is not, but in that case it is no real problem for the retailer either. Have a pallet in the back for this stuff, when pallet is full call recycler. I have this done at work all the time, they pay 1 cent per pound for that sort of unsorted electronics. The pickup fee is normally covered by that.
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France has been doing the same thing, but that's not the same WEEE. The one you're talking about is this one [europa.eu], dated from 2003. The "eco-tax" has been applied since 2005, IIRC.
The main difference, as I understand it, is that the 2003 WEEE left it up to the member state to define which scheme to implement, in order to recoup the costs of recycling electronic goods:
From this website [conformance.co.uk]:
It is important to note that the WEEE Directive does not stipulate how its aims should be achieved and the system therefore currently varies between member states. A new WEEE Directive is proposed for publication in early 2012 that should solve this problem, among others.
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Likewise, but while a laudable intiative, its important to keep track of the whole process. A lot of that e-waste, maybe even the majority, gets smuggled out and dumped into developing countries where villagers burn the stuff in their fields to get what they can out of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/science/earth/27waste.html?pagewanted=all [nytimes.com]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/electronic-waste-developing-world [guardian.co.uk]
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They now charge a 'recycling fee' on new electronic appliances. This goes from a couple of cents for small electronics to a couple of euros for fridges.
Ah that's just great. Of course, I've had old computers refused here in Ontario because they were built by me, instead of nice and you know made by a manufacturer. Until I pointed out that under the OERF that's illegal. Yep, places here were very happy to start collecting that fee.
Let the free market take care of this (Score:2)
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There are 2 Ace Hardware stores in my town. One of them recycles CFL bulbs for free, no matter where you buy them. The other does not offer this service. Therefore I refuse to spend money at the non-recycling Ace Hardware. I take my money to the store that does the recycling. The market of 'me' is demanding recycling services of retailers.
I simply refuse to buy CFL in the first place - horrible technology, from the poisons inside it to the "brightness" of the bulb.
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The idea that the free market can take care of this assumes that a meaningful fraction of customers give a shit about this kind of stuff.
A lot of electronics "recycling" is a fraud (Score:4, Informative)
In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World [pbs.org] 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 [softpedia.com] 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.
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Hi.
I have been involved in this reverse logistics business for a while and was responsible for getting a few hundred thousand mobile phones back from consumers' hands to where the devices could be processed.
There was not a big conspiracy or mistery around what happened with the phones. Despite some envious consumers disaproving or it, those phones good enough to have a market value were wiped out and sold as different grades of "used". Some would get new covers and looked new, while other were B grade and s
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I hate to spoil the article for you but...
The French (Score:3)
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!"
Weee (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0p-U1LBbQ [youtube.com]
Pay to return? or get a discount because of return (Score:1)
This is Just Buck Passing (Score:2)
Such goods are already treated separately. Ever tried to get a TV or washing machine into a wheelie bin with the rest of the rubbish?
Canada has electronics recyclers (Score:2)
And, they prosecute you for removing em again! (Score:2)
There is really big money in this received hardware, both in it's recycle and on getting it out of circulation so you buy the new products.
If you head off a guy who is about to throw away some old hardware however, they get really unsure about how to treat you. They want to claim you are stealing, but at the same time they are unsure about from whom...
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Can anyone find the mistake?
LCDs are so 2008. Is there any indium in LED monitors?
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Its not in the florescent tubes or LED or whatever your LCD screen uses for illumination.
Actually, it is. Indium is used in the production of low-power led devices, and has been for decades (long before modern led-based screens). You can find a lot of information on Wikipedia, but also check http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/futures/LF-LEDs/index.asp [rpi.edu] for an overview (they specifically mention white leds)
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
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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 recycl
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" I guess you could call that a form of recycling."
It's not, but it's better!
Aside from just recycling there's a concept you see a lot of called 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - those three are in *order of preference*. Better than recycling something - i.e. sending it through an industrial process to reclaim some raw material components from it for re-fabrication later - is just to re-use the finished product as is. So, your example of TV 're-use'. Or returning beer/milk bottles, which are usually just washed/st
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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.
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My bets are on "promession". Freeze a sealed tub full of old electronics using liquid nitrogen. Shake and pound the tub until the only parts remaining are dust, then seperate these using magnets (to attract metals) or a centrifuge (seperating metals from light plastic).
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Re:All our resources are still here (Score:4, Interesting)
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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!
At the household recycling sites in the UK, the monitors and TVs are simply stacked into a standard container. When the container is full, it's taken away in a lorry/train/barge (for the latter, I like the irony of "Smuggler's Way" in south London being the recycling site).
Remember the alternative is still to collect the monitors, still to transport them, but then to deal with the problems of heavy metals leeching into the groundwater.
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So it is economically worthwhile for the west to recycle these thngs for these expensive atoms. Fair enough.
Why hasn't some greedy capitalist taken advantage of this if it is truly profitable? Why does there need to be a law?
No disasterbatory haterages of capitalism, please. Real observations only. Why?
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Only $200/pound? Really? I was looking a few months ago and the price was still up around $800/kilo. [metalprices.com] 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. Ge
WEEED (Score:1)
Brought to you by Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men!
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] reopened and is due to reach full production latter this year.
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Which frankly, is as it should be. If the Chinese can mine and produce rare earth metals at prices that can put all the competition out of business, that's good for them. But that doesn't mean they should. The world is hungry enough for these metals that they can sell at the same price as Mountain Pass without running out of customers... and at those prices their mines will be incredibly profitable.
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and don't give a crap about the environment.
On a per-capita basis, China produces about one quarter the pollution that the USA produces.
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:All our resources are still here (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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even when you compare all source that are off the scale. There horrid coal emissions more then make up for there bicycles.
If their polluter where held to the same pollution goals as the US, then you would have a point.
But they don't and neither do you.
China produces 500Million more tonnes of CO2 per year then the US.
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Yeah, but who would read Basic these days anyway? You should care more about the Python reading comprehension. :-)
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But you could always get them from the bottom of the ocean, at considerable expense.
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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).
Re:Already in place in Sweden? (Score:4, Insightful)
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oh they would.. they would just refurb it and sell it again. you can still buy iphone 3gs..
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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.
They are required to either accept the old stuff when you buy something, or pay a general fee for stuff to be recycled (and you take it to the recycling site, or the council collects it).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEEE#Member_state_implementation [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Already in place in Sweden? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Many many many years ago there was a very funny "Shoe" cartoon strip (possibly the only one...) where the old bird takes his old car in for an oil change, and asks the mechanic bird what he does with the old oil.
Acting upon it, he says, "Well, I just take it out around back..." and is confronted with a U.S. Coast Guard ship pointing a large gun at him, continuing, "and drink it."
AC
Landfill (Score:2)
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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. My google-fu right now has failed me so I can't find a reference.
I might be that what was optional now will be mandatory and different countries could already have this in effect.
More googling suggests that this is how it is. /C
Mandatory in Finland also, can't recall how many years already. But it's not just that, you can also take your old electronics to local dump and recycle them for free. This also works for all other household item's that can be recycled, like old car batteries. No reason to throw them into river or park at night.
Indeed (Score:5, Funny)
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
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Retailers in the UK have, I think, had to collect WEEE goods under law for a while now
Retailers have to collect items they have sold, not items sold by others. From what I've depicted from the titlle (no I haven't read the article)m now retailers are obligated to collect an item, regardless of the origin.
I do know that retailers in the UK are paid by the weight of their electronic goods recycled, and not by their value in terms of rare earth metals and so on
I think you are mistaken. Retailers/manufacturers/importers pay by the weight and reciclability of what they sell. Additionally, you must pay an "importer fee" (it was 500 GBP, but may have changed) to then be able to pay per item sold. REEE regulation in EU is an absolute mess, because - lo
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Certainly while I worked there, the company was absolutely happy to accept any WEEE goods from anyone, including those who hadn't bought anything from the shop. We had people coming in and giving us WEEE goods and then leaving without looking at anything. It seems to me that such a policy would only be in the company's interest if they were being paid by weight to do it.
Yeah, here in Portugal that is common practice too, but not in all stores, and not all items. We also have large recycle bins at the entrance of large shopping areas for small appliances, batteries and lamps. (And used kitchen oil too, but that's not relevant)
I was quite familiarized with WEEE regulations in my previous job, and the specifics of some of the EU countries (UK, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy and Czech Republic) - specially because I had to educate our (not-so-big) suppliers - and even some