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- Embed this notice@pyrate The thing is, e-waste can't really be recycled.
e-waste "Recycling" typically consists of one or a few of the following;
- Desoldering off old components and electrolyte caps etc to sell as new - typically only a few components per board can be recovered.
- Sanding off coatings etc and dumping boards into vats of mercury to extract the gold.
- Grinding down whole computers and extracting the metals as scrap.
Computers don't really contain much silicon, as typically the die etc in the CPU is very small, while the rest of the computer is mostly metal, with PCB's usually made out of sheets of copper and fibreglass or paper impregnated with a phenol formaldehyde resin .
Even if you have a bunch of CPUs to grind down, such silicon is of poor purity as it's doped and has a bunch of gates etched into it.
Once "recycling" is done, anything that remains is either dumped wherever or into landfill.
Companies really love shilling the idea of "recycle your old computers and buy our new ones that are even more proprietary, to save energy", but really when you run the numbers as to how much energy it takes to manufacture a computer, it's more energy efficient to run a old computer for 30 years than to buy a new one.