Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

Separating things made of many materials is hard, especially when some components are hazardous.

Purifying materials drawn from waste is hard.

These aren’t impossible challenges, but physical facts of the problem that have kept costs too high for electronics recycling to be widespread.

Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.

But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.

That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass bottle or a Coca Cola can.

Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.

yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)

Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.

Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.

Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.

Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.

I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.

We need to get past this idea that just because recycling makes you feel good must mean it IS good. Most of the time recycling stuff uses more CO2 than simply throwing it into a hole and making another one.

It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.

The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.

China sells a machine for anything you can imagine: Here is a wire grinding machine to recover the copper from wires: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p_hmDdGIk7g

PCBs first seem to be cut up before put into similar machines machine above: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WO-VvucMq4E

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_O1EpEcKaM

Dont know what happens to the ground epoxy resin, maybe mixed with other materials?

When we design these things (which I do for a living) we often find we are forced into tradeoffs between repairability/recycleability and manufacturability/cost. The market wants cheaper and cheaper things. To accommodate we need to make them less repairable and recyclable.

Processing mineral ores into raw materials is cheaper.

So the only way is to regulate market, meaning forcing companies to put in the extra work.

Currently these regulations tend to be circumvented by illegally exporting e-waste into countries with cheap labour, no such regulations or corruption (usually all at the same time).

Designing something to be recyclable and also designing the equipment that could recycle it is much more expensive than designing it to be just dumped as garbage and designing only the equipment needed to make it from pure raw materials.

Using most materials in closed cycles (except those that can already be recycled efficiently by living beings), which is absolutely necessary for the survival of mankind, will never happen unless mandated by law, because any business tries to push such costs to someone else.

Recycling will happen only when the sales of any object will be forbidden, unless the raw materials from which it has been made, besides a list of exceptions, can be recovered in a very high proportion, e.g. 99% and someone will be liable if this does not happen.

Obviously, if such laws will ever be adopted, they would have to implemented very gradually, i.e. there should be a grace period of several years, and then the mandated efficiency of recycling should be initially very low, with a plan to raise every few years. Similarly, the number of exceptions might be initially large, but then some of the exceptions should be eliminated when adequate technologies are developed.

For now, there is no serious research in true recycling technologies, which really reverse the fabrication process of a product, because there are neither any money to be gained from having such technologies, nor any money to be lost from not having such technologies.

Electronics devices are harder to recycle completely than almost anything else, because besides materials that are used in great quantities, e.g. plastic, copper and silicon, there are a lot of chemical elements that are used in minute quantities, e.g. arsenic, antimony, germanium, hafnium, cobalt, tungsten and many others.

Those elements, even if they are much more valuable than the major elements from an electronic device, are also much more difficult to extract from a device, because of their very low proportion.

Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.

If companies like Apple cared truly cared about the environment. We would have phones, laptops with easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.

Framework is the closest we have come to having a thin profile laptop and easily repairable and upgradeable hardware.

You are attempting to filter out trace amounts valuable dopants and some small amounts of metals with value from, essentially, a pile of sand.

This is not energetically or chemically easy.

I will take a shot in the dark somewhere in the middle. Intellectual property. As long as transparency and standardization are disincentivized it will be pretty hard to orchestrate un-building anything.

I wonder if we're converging on all products becoming "good enough" that the pace of innovation will slow and this will change for the better?

Plastic.

Let's look at an example. Let's say your phones main board, which will net a few hundred grams of raw materials. First thing by weight the actual board itself is probably the biggest, if you could perfectly decompose it to it's parts you would have some fiberglass, glue, a few grams of copper, and maybe a trace amount of gold. Next you would have the different components, mostly ICs but let's cover them next. These are mostly plastic with bits of copper, tin, and other more exotic metals. Most of these could be used again, if you can separate them and sort them. There would be a bunch of solder, which maybe could be reused, if you remix it with more flux. Finally, you'll have chips, these could be reused, but only as replacements for the same chip. Getting anything out of these would mostly be removing the bulk of the material which is silicon that's been contaminated with other elements to make the semiconductors. I don't think there is any process right now that could take doped Si and get you anything back. Besides the silicon you have micrograms of gold and other conductors.

Having put all that down, I think there could be an opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.

It's not so much that electronics are unrecyclable, it's that nearly everything is unrecyclable.

Recycling is nearly a fantasy. For the most part it has been a campaign for waste management firms to charge customers double while demanding they separate their own garbage, and punish them for doing it wrong. The charade lasted so long because much of the "recycling" was dumped in Asia and ended up in the ocean from there.