A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham (vice.com) 166
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.
Tell me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Where they found a battery with enough juice to power a GPS (Radio) device for the months required to cross the ocean, through the hull of a ship, and then have the GPS unit pass undetected through customs etc?
I think it's more likely someone found the GPS unit, and sold it on Ebay, raising a false positive when it was powered up. Or, the entire article could be a sham to begin with.
Re:Tell me... (Score:5, Informative)
You assume you need to power a GPS 24/7 to be able to track something. A tiny microcontroller can run for months on a battery, powering up the GPS maybe once a day, long enough to read the position before shutting it down again.
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You don't just need a GPS, you need a cellular radio, a SIM that works worldwide and the ability (or a strong enough receiver) to get both signals through whatever object they put them in. Given that most electronics have metal casings I find the idea that they pulled this off on the scale they claim to be quite suspect.
As a result I'd be willing to bet that they sent out very few of these devices and "extrapolated" out the data they claim and a proper statistical review of their methods and sample size wou
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I would take that bet
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
I worked with similar devices a few years ago. The idea is you power on. Check for any coverage. None? Do not bother turning on the GPS. Set a HW wakeup clock for 2 days from now. Remember cell phones at one point lasted 1-3 weeks on 1 charge. Oh and it only needs to be on for 1-5 mins tops. If you are putting it into super backoff sleepmode? You probably could easily get a year out of the thing. Remember there is no screen and no more than a f
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You don't just need a GPS, you need a cellular radio, a SIM that works worldwide and the ability (or a strong enough receiver) to get both signals through whatever object they put them in. Given that most electronics have metal casings I find the idea that they pulled this off on the scale they claim to be quite suspect.
I see that you a) don't open electronics very often, and b) have no idea just how little power some of these devices use or how easy and cheap they are to make.
What you're talking about fits in a tiny footprint, if it only updates every couple of hours can easily run for many months on a battery, and as for the metal casing, well let me just giggle a bit at the thought that electronics are still made that way.
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Now report once a week instead and you have a device that can last over a year.
Power-down times for such devices is near infinite, what drains the battery is when those things have to do something.
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Actually pretty much this is what happens in various applications already. Devices can remain powered down for times longer than the average AAA battery has shelf life, power up for a few seconds to find out whether they find a GSM net, transmit their data if they have any and power back down. The same can be done for GPS, there is no need to power that GPS system for longer than a few seconds, and if you want to be highly sophisticated about it, include an attitude sensor, compare its readings with the cur
Re: Tell me... (Score:1)
You can get some cheap GPS tracking units on eBay that have a battery that lasts close to a month, reporting position every 30 seconds.
But that's nothing extraordinary. If you go for the expensive, professional stuff, you can get units that last close to a year on battery.
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There isn't any "customs etc" involved here. All of this shit is loaded onto enormous container ships and gets dumped in places like Guiyu, China [wikipedia.org]. Nobody's inspecting that shit, it's all garbage, it lands at port at Haimen and gets trucked 10 miles inland to massive dumps where it's picked over by little kids who melt everything down looking for precious metals. Nobody is going to detect a GPS unit buried amongst 500 tons of busted up monitors and breadboards.
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There are almost a billion little kids in China and most of them are disposable.
Either your definition of little kid is a bit broken, or you massively exaggerated the number of little kids in China. China has 1.3 billion people, so saying they have a billion children doesn't make much sense at all.
Re:Tell me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Sorry, you actual knowledge is false because random internet conspiracy guy says so. He had a whole 3 reasons he came up with in his head without any actual knowledge, so he must be right.
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Where they found a battery with enough juice to power a GPS (Radio) device for the months required to cross the ocean
Well, that took 5 seconds. The third result of a Google search for "long life GPS cellular tracking (http://digitalmatter.com/Devices/Remora) is a non-descript device which features a 5 year battery life with once-per-day tracking, which seems more than adequate for this. If you don't like that one, the results of that search are filled with others.
through the hull of a ship
The location while in transit across the ocean isn't relevant to this study, so the device doesn't have to transmit through the hull of the ship. It just has
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Been known since the 1970's. All your international counter-terrorism stuff has covered it. It's even covered in the basic stuff they teach you at police colleges and has been since the 90's here in Canada along with domestic terrorism, there's something similar in larger police force colleges in the US. If anything the problem has gotten worse because there is simply so much traffic now. At the two busiest ports in Canada, we scan like 3% of containers using gamma ray radiography. I'd expect at ports
Recycling fee (Score:2)
I don't know about elsewhere, but in California when you buy any sort of large electronics (TV, computer, monitor, etc.) there's a recycling fee added as a line item on the receipt to cover recycling the device when it's discarded. Recyclers in California should be getting paid for every device they take with money that's already been collected for that purpose. Maybe that recycling fee needs to be increased and applied nation-wide, with payment going only to those recyclers who actually recycle the equipme
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You seem to be missing the bit where they are committing fraud and not recycling anything just dumping in overseas in third world countries. Paying them more with tax payer dollars will not change anything except their profit margin. Just typical capitalist corporations, being typical capitalist corporations. Think an honest one will save you, nope, so dishonest psychopaths just pays more that it is worth, fires most employees, ends the recycling and starts dumping the stuff in third world countries. How ab
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Recycling is handled by waste disposal people. On the US East coast, at least, waste disposal is handled by organized crime... is anyone shocked that they lie about their recycling activities when those lies mean profit?
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Though what you say is true about some materials, there are a large number of materials that can be recycled very easily. My municipality doesn't take those things that aren't economical to recycle but they will take any metal, plastics 1 & 2, cardboard and paper. All of these are very easily recycled, and the value of the material often covers the recycling. Plastic 1 (PET) is very easily recycled into numerous products. Paper products are so valuable these days due to the shortage of lumber for proces
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Yes, glass is used industrially. But it is used because the recyclers pay you to take it away. So, if you need filler, glass it is!
Need to stop exporting recycling goods (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's not garbage it's used goods!
Don't blame 'capitalism' (Score:3)
It's all about who pays for what how. The fact that it is far easier to chuck the broken kit and buy new than get the upgrade / repair is a result of the incredible efficiency of mass production. If you want to avoid waste, you have to make the waste worth something - a standard trick in the Chemical industry, but one not associated with electronics because of the speed of change - or make visibly recycling electronics a mandatory requirement, to be paid for by a visible tax on electronic items. Which is th
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Good reply. The problem is that even if a resource is free, it doesn't mean that a use for it can be created, otherwise no garbage would have to go to landfill. However this article is a reminder that there is an 'industry' of making corrupt money out of inadequately enforced legislation.
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Better to just dump it in California. Screw 'em
Re: Need to stop exporting recycling goods (Score:2)
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That sounds like a HORRIBLE idea. Nobody in this country wants to keep using my old Pentium 4, which is why I threw it out. But in 3rd world countries, for free, that's a hell of a useful item. I know all those older WiMax cell phones are considered trash in the US, but other countries still have WiMax networks, so why disallow exports to where they can keep being used?
Export of used vehicles to 3rd world countri
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Sounds to me like capitalism already found its solution...
yeah, and people are always super surprised when their health care isn't primo. Turns out profit motive doesn't cure you. it keeps you on a slow drop of expensive drugs.
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You pulled that directly out of your ass. It's not true.
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Likewise, I have had to get old parts to make some computers work, so I went to the local e-recycler. If it worked, they re-sold it and made money locally. If not, they broke it apart and sent the board with gold or silver to be
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Nothing you've said support- your previous claims at all. You're still completely fabricating what you imagine happens on the other end.
The reality, meanwhile is that entire industries are built around salvaging working equipment out of the e-waste stream.
Why your "donated" computer is probably worthless (Score:2)
Nobody in this country wants to keep using my old Pentium 4, which is why I threw it out. But in 3rd world countries, for free, that's a hell of a useful item.
You are making the potentially (likely) faulty presumption that it is economically worthwhile to send it there or that crappy, beat up, second hand electronics would have substantial utility there. In all likelihood by the time you refurbish the gear, ship it halfway around the world, and by some miracle hope that there is someone on the other end with an economic interest in doing something with the gear, the "lucky" recipients would probably be better served by getting something new for similar amounts o
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The reason people are getting rid of their WiMax equipment, is because the network is being shutdown here. How does that translate to other countries that still have active networks? Your logic there... needs some work.
I'm sure they "have equipment". Just as they have cars to drive on their
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The old mantra "crime doesn't pay" is false. For any ethical activity you can imagine there is an unethical way which realizes more profit.
Since the only goal is "more profit" then everything descends into unethical behavior, and we all put the blinders on because we're paying marginally less for it.
There's always someone willing to take less.
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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.
Exporting it is capitalism's "solution". If that becomes illegal, what makes you think they will suddenly switch to a nice solution, instead of, say, filling up the areas next to national parks, because the land is cheap, or other not-so-nice solutions that are the lowest possible expense?
Anything that's important to other than the capitalist is a decision that should not be made by the capitalist.
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BUT, I think that capitalism will find quick uses for these. For example, plastic and paper can and should be burned for energy. It will produce CO2, but, this is going to other nations and then being used in the same way.
Glass and Metals will be recycled again and new uses will be found.
e-waste can be disassembled via robotics and then parted.
It's cute how Naive you are (Score:2)
What we are absolutely _not_ going to do is properly dispose of it. There's always an underclass you can shit on. If all else fails there are 5 little words that end any di
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If we keep the waste here, it will NOT be landfilled. Why? Because regs prevent it. IOW, burning for energy, combined with recycling, are the only options other than sending it overseas. And once export stop
Need to stop them, its our trash! (Score:2)
I'm sure President Trump will know how to solve this with a wall or something....
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Curious that you wave a capitalist flag but then insist as a precondition on a strongly-anti-capitalist ban on exports.
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Arbitrarily constraining things IS utterly anticapitalist.
Setting a surcharge on things that more accurately reflects the tragedy of the commons (ie, if you ship electronics overseas, and we know that the prices charged for disposal there are not reflective of the long-term environmental damage) would be the capitalist response, not just a ban by fiat.
Then capitalists can choose their solution based on economic priorities, and meanwhile accurately price their goods to consumers to bear that additional fair
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Seriously, the ONLY way to solve this, is for us to stop allowing ANY garbage to be exported.
No, we can instead choose not to have mandatory recycling programs for stuff that isn't worth recycling. And continue to export our trash to regions of the world that want it.
The key issue here is that there isn't actually a problem that needs solving any more than it already is solved.
Most importantly, it will help bring back manufacturing since we will then have resources that need to be used, and can not be exported.
That's a fantasy. The economic reasons why it's not recycled now will still hold.
Alternative to trashing CRTs (Score:2)
The push to "recycle" old CRTs by sending them to places that claim to properly dispose of them is probably misguided to begin with. There's a mentality that CRT = ancient, worthless technology. But until 2006 or so, these were still being manufactured and sold in stores. The dropoff in sales was sharp and sudden, once LCD and plasma technologies took hold.
The fact is, you still see a number of motel chains using CRT TVs in the rooms. And why not? They're perfect for that purpose! Being heavier/bulkier an
"Analog stuff" pollute 1000x less. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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And I'm salivating over their old iPhone 6's! At 1/3 the original price or less. Win/win
eBay / Local (Score:2)
I much prefer the eBay / local company route (like Re:PC). Instead of just scrapping old hardware, it is serviced into other older machines to keep them running.
an example I bring up all the time is the HP 2100 LaserJet printers from the late '90s. These things still work GREAT. They have 3 DIMM slots though, so I've salvaged extra RAM for them from eBay over the years. Who the hell else wants old 16MiB DIMMs anyways? So someone puts them up on eBay, and I buy them. They get a little extra side cash, and th
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You should move up to the 2300. They are cheap now. I mean, I just saw one at the local Salvation Army last-chance-before-landfill store. I would have picked it up, but I already have one.
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Anymore most of the electronic equipment I buy is used. I got a used 802.3at poe splitter a couple weeks ago on ebay for $20 had to make my own power adapter for but I still saved $20
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And for every HP 2100 that you save, a thousand others just chucked away a shoddily built three year old inkjet printer that's not worth fixing or even buying new ink for when it runs out. There are millions of pounds of e-Waste that *noone* wants. An old CRT monitor will cost you a hundred times more to mail to someone that that anyone will be w
Propaganda against used computers (Score:4, Interesting)
It is true that computer garbage is worthless crap, except when you re-use parts (or whole items). In some countries, people repair even dumb phones.
Basel is a mouthpiece for the recycling industries, they're paid to make high profile stories once in a while. The industries want for all US garbage to be destroyed in the US. This would expand their business, that's all. They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
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They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
That's like saying that being shot in the chest isn't necessarily a bad thing, because if you make it to the hospital and survive surgery the doctor may find an unrelated health problem that may have been otherwise missed. So you see, a gunshot wound might save your life!
Notwithstanding a few mostly anecdotal and theoretical upsides, this junk mostly acts as toxic waste. There are more efficient and less polluting ways to deliver a laptop to that African kid, other than hoping that someone finds the parts w
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It is true that computer garbage is worthless crap, except when you re-use parts (or whole items). In some countries, people repair even dumb phones. Basel is a mouthpiece for the recycling industries, they're paid to make high profile stories once in a while. The industries want for all US garbage to be destroyed in the US. This would expand their business, that's all. They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
Yes, let's keep the status quo and ship an entire computer for the LCD panel to prevent US corporations from making money while recycling responsibly.
Couldn't we do both? (Score:2)
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Carbon credits... (Score:3)
There's Too Much Graft Involved (Score:1)
Politicians like this scheme because there's graft involved. They can get contributions from the companies that participate in this.
The so-called environmental politicians would prefer to see something scrapped than for someone to get some use out of used electronics.
I'm typing this right now on a HP laptop that was thrown out. It had HP's infamous lead free solder ball grid array problem. Taking the motherboard out, putting it in a toaster over at 350 for 10 minutes, and then blowing a heat gun on the grap
Here's a thought (Score:2)
How about making electronics stuff that, you know, lasts? And that can be economically repaired? Why don't we, as a culture, forego the latest bit of shiny in favour of, I dunno, 4-or-5-year-old devices that still do what they're needed to do, even if they're slightly slower, slightly bigger or smaller, and a bit lower in resolution? And while we're at it, let's make it fucking illegal to sell products whose batteries can't be easily and readily replaced by the user.
The three R's of conservation are, in des
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Thank You! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - in that order. Is that even taught anymore? I don't even think most people could explain what "reduce" is.
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In the PC arena, however, developers tell us that we should pitch those awful, terrible, useless 32-bit machines that are sitting around everywhere. They won't write software for that ancient, antiquated, useless junk; they only write shiny new 64-bit software now so those old 32-bit machines are stuck in the past. Pity.
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The Athlon 64 was introduced in 2003. And you can still buy 32 bit Windows at least. I have as much disdain for new not-better crap that's pumped out as a lot of people, but the move to 64bit has been much slower than I thought. I'd say most applications are still made 32-bit unless they have a real good reason to go 64-bit.
DoRD (Score:2)
Wrong!
"The value of the raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics is less than it costs to actually recycle them."
or
"The raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics are worth less than it costs to actually recycle them."
Surprised? (Score:2)
Been telling people (on here even) this for years.
Some companies do do it properly. A lot just ship off to China to someone who signs a form to SAY they are compliant when they are quite obviously not.
There are documentaries galore where they GPS-tag junk and it ends up in landfill.
There's no way to make things profitable that aren't, unless you break laws, cut corners or don't do what you say you will.
In previous years, I shipped 100 old dead CRT's to a WEEE-authorised disposal firm. Some guy came round
Simply put, the Economics of Recycling. . . (Score:3)
. . . . just isn't there for most ***CONSUMER*** materials. other than Aluminum cans. Or to quote Penn and Teller:
Recycling is. . . bullshit [watchseries.ac]
Now, for metals, on an industrial level, recycling can make sense, steel also makes particular sense, in sufficient quantity.
For consumer recycling, things are hard to recycle ON PURPOSE. Just like they're impossible to repair: giving the consumer no option than to go out and buy a new one.
I'm showing my age, but I can still remember when there were vacuum tube testers in most hardware stores: you'd pull a tube you suspected was bad, test it, and if it WAS bad, you'd buy a replacement from the rack built underneath the tube tester.
The entire consumer industrial base is designed around obsolescence and replacement, rather than repair and/or upgrade. . .
Counterfeit Electronic Parts (Score:2)
..what happens when they don't ship it overseas (Score:2)
The news articles detailed how this Recycling Plant(TM) would Recycle old mobile phones and computer equipment.
The CEO explained: There are small amounts of gold and other metals in all
Recycle Sham (Score:2)
E-waste is not landfilled in China. They salvage all the metals by molten salt immersive extraction. The copper and aluminium are too valuable to throw away.
Just read a few of these. https://www.google.ca/search?q... [google.ca]
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and other recycling methods, parts and motors are often hand removed first
Re:Good grief! (Score:5, Funny)
We apologise for the faults in the summary. Those responsible have been sacked.
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The editors were replaced with dancing llamas a looong time ago (and not at great expense, either).
Re:Good grief! (Score:4, Insightful)
And the transition was so seamless that barely anyone noticed it.
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Re:Good grief! (Score:4, Informative)
They could have just copied from the last time this same story was posted back in May [slashdot.org]... or this one on the same topic from April of last year [slashdot.org]... or maybe this same story from December of the year before (2013) [slashdot.org]... or the Australian version from 2010 [slashdot.org]... the UK version from 2014? [slashdot.org]... Or maybe from this one in 2009 [slashdot.org]... or this other story in 2010? [slashdot.org]... or this other version in 2008 [slashdot.org]... or a charitable version in 2010 [slashdot.org].
I knew I'd seen this "story" somewhere before, but at that point, I admit I got bored and stopped looking for more.
If this is still considered news, or newsworthy... well, let's just say it takes the concept of repeated stories on the same topic to a new level...
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While there are dupes a lot of those stories are actually different stories on the same subject.
It is important for consumers of recycling services to be informed of this (It would be more useful to
have a list of bona-fide recyclers) and not everyone reads every article in the feed, so it's not
a huge deal to have periodic reminders on the subject -- though, the actual dupes we could do well
without. In other words if we all just pointed a problem out once when it is first discovered and then
never mentioned
Re:Good grief! (Score:5, Funny)
Because there is little oversight or enforcement, a secondary industry of fake editors has popped up to undercut sustainable editing. These "editors," which advertise themselves as green and sustainable, get paid pennies per post about old TVs, computers, printers, and monitors. Rather than edit them domestically, the editing companies sell them to editors in developing nations, either through middlemen or directly. These foreign editors hire low-wage employees to pick through the few valuable components of often toxic old stories.
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Who edited and proof-read this summary? Oh, wait, nevermind...
Proof-read? Who even read it? It is a wall of text.. Just insert some new-lines for crist sake.
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Re:not complete sham (Score:4, Interesting)
And that, unfortunately, is the inconvenient truth about recycling. It's seems like a good idea, and we've been taught for our entire lives not to be wasteful, and we don't want to hurt the environment, so obviously recycling must be a really good thing. Right? Well, the problem is the old saying 'the devil is in the details'. When you look closely, very closely, at recycling, it's not such a great idea.
The recycling process itself produces a lot of pollutants. In Washington state, the top air polluters are all recycling centers. And at least one of them has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for repeatedly violating air pollution standards.
Paper recycling generates a sludge that is sent to a landfill where it can leach dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals into groundwater. If you think that there would be regulations against that, you’d be right. But there’s one loophole: mixing anything else with the paper sludge, even just sand, turns it from waste into a product. And there are no regulations against tossing tens of thousands of tons of your product into a landfill.
Most plastics can't be recycled. There are about seven types of plastic that you’ll find in day to day life, and only two of them are recyclable. Anything else placed in a recycling bin will be collected, processed, and sorted, and then thrown straight into a landfill. Even trying to recycle some things—for example the plastic that electronics are packaged in—wastes all those resources.
But it gets worse: Plastic is automatically sorted at recycling plants, but the process is far from perfect. As a result some plastics can slip through even when they’re not supposed to, and you might end up with chemicals like BPA in plastics that aren’t supposed to have it.
Most small scale motor oil recycling centers use something known as the acid-clay process. This gets impurities out of the oil, but leaves you with a toxic sludge containing all of those impurities, plus dangerous chemicals like hydrochloric acid. So what do they do with that toxic waste? They burn it, sending chemicals like nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide into the air. And that’s pretty much the official, EPA approved method.
Glass is made from sand, the most abundant resource on the planet. The process for recycling glass is more detrimental than the process for creating virgin glass.
But the biggest flaw in recycling doesn’t have anything to do with the technical process—it’s the mindset it gives people. The idea is that by putting materials in the recycle bin, by buying products made from recycled material, we’re saving the environment—we’re all a team of individual Captain Planets, kicking pollution to the curb. But how effective is that when the US alone still produces 250 million tons of trash every year?
Recycling’s main impact is to convince us that it’s okay to be wasteful because we make up for it through recycling. It encourages consumption, rather than focusing on ways to reduce overall consumption and generate less trash to begin with.
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Sadly, this inconvenient truth won't be seen by many because you posted as an A.C.
Consume less, waste less.
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Humans can be awful yet also very trusting of what our community tells us, ie. we accept the mantra to recycle without asking how that actually works. So many problems would change if we realised how much of it is down to groupthink. Buddhists are always complaining that we are too individualistic, yet it seems we need to become more individualistic, more free thinking, because that's smarter, and as people become smarter, they tend to also become less selfish.
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"Glass is made from sand, the most abundant resource on the planet."
This isn't quite true. Not all "sand" is equal, and not all of it is suitable for glass production (I'd suggest very little of it is) at least using current inexpensive processes.
The stuff that goes on the road in the winter isn't the same as the stuff that goes into making bottles. Probably a factor of how large the grains are (i.e. fine)
That said, I have no idea if the recycling process is more or less detrimental than the creation of new
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Or socialization. Government-run (or at least funded) recycling centers subjected to public oversight, funded by cost-appropriate recycling fees charged at purchase.
Either way, you're right, proper enforcement is key. But it becomes far more difficult once the chain of responsibility leads outside the country and our laws and enforcing agencies no longer have any power.
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Wait, we are paying more to stop the guilt of killing the planet. These taxes and fees are 100% being used to stop killing the planet.
After all, that's what the laws were about - to stop killing the planet.
Don't you trust the lobbiests and gubment to DO THE RIGHT THING?
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Kidding aside, There are three big screens I see daily left to rot in the yard. One is two houses down that has been sitting there for four years, one that is one house down that sat on the sidewalk for a month before being moved to the side of the house for 2 months, and one on the corner of the neighborhood that's been there for 8 months
It's a fifty dollar fee to dispose of them locally. So they either rot in yards or end up in the local forest preserve.
.
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It's actually been that way for years with refrigerators in many parts of Europe at least.
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Because we cannot have the state do the correct thing now, can we?
So, more Capitalism, more scams, more frauds
THE FREE MARKET AT WORK FOR YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN
Oh, wait....
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A free market society also has to deal with fraud the same as a mercantile or socialist economy.
So, rather than saying that a free market economy would do nothing about said problem why don't you see what they would do?
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Sorry, I can't remember the last time a solder joint failed on me. To be honest, I can't remember the last time a board failed on me. What I get nowadays is physical breakage (screens, hinges, plastics, etc.) on much less sophisticated parts, and the much MORE sophisticated parts break nowhere near as often as the boards in my TV's that I had back in the "renting-a-TV" days.
I honestly can't remember how old my TV is. Or my DVD player. Or my router. Or any of the PCs in my house. They are all at least
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Attributed to:
"use of the wrong type of lead-free solder"
Not "lead-free solder" but using some cheap junk instead.
Lead-free solder, in and of itself, isn't the problem. It's people using cheap junk. Same way you could haved used pound-shop leaded solder and got the same problem.
Or capacitors with stolen-formula electrolyte that failed over time taking out millions of devices (Google "Capacitor Plague"). Nothing to do with "using capacitors". Everything to do with using cheap junk instead.
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Great.
Tell me when every computer chassis is like that, every laptop chassis, and I can pick up the upgrade boards in PC World (not that I would, but there you go).
Until then, it's nothing more than "yet-another-standard"
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Is it a fee or a deposit, i.e. you get a refund when you return the item? Because if it's a sunk cost what's to stop you chucking it in a ditch anyway (other than not wanting to be an asshool)?
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Old TVs grow fucking legs and walk back to the factory, do they?
It's pointless, because there's no incentive for the *user* to actually return it to anywhere rather than dumping it.
Belgium has this "recupel" shit but sometimes you can't walk down the road due to dumped TVs & fridges, for exactly the point you completely missed above. It's a tax, no more, no less.
This is like totally fucking *obvious* if you think for like 30 seconds.
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I think that is generally a good idea. Although America has the most innovative slimy corporations in the entire world, its really what we do best. It should be a simple matter of creating a shell company, moving the extra revenue set aside for recycling away from it and then spinning it off so it can fail to alleviate the problem of actually paying for your own mess.