Wouldn't "e-waste" - properly handled - by an income source for developing world nations? For sure there's plenty of health and safety problems to be handled carefully, but allowing people to salvage various minerals and metals would seem a useful idea.
I'm pretty sure they are already doing this, if not acquiring new minerals by active mining. I wonder if the actual compute r would be worth more as a functional device in a developing nation?
Right, but put together a 'recycling company'. What's the cheapest way when you don't have access to skilled labor? Probably to just melt it all down and skim off the 1% or 2% of gold...
But even with semi-skilled labour you can recycle copper reasonably easily. At least, it could be done a lot better than just burning the insulation off cables.
There's so much stuff which could be reasonably easily recycled - the lead, aluminium, copper are all easy. Then stuff like gold is extractable. Then the rare earth minerals - is it easier to scrape all the surface mount components of a board and then extract the tantalum etc than it is to mine those things from raw ore?
I understand the need to protect developing nations by not just dumping garbage on them in the guise of "second hand computing good enough to use".
As I understand it, one of the problems is that in some places the safety equipment you give people has a high re-sale value, thus people sell their boots / gloves /masks to get cash. I'm not sure how that'd be fixed.
It's pretty common for whole parts (not only raw materials) salvaged from e-waste to be resold (usually not designated as salvaged and sold as new, but that's entirely different matter).
They are doing this. When you send this crap (and non e-waste) crap to China, people are going out and making a living extracting whatever they can. They are pulling out the copper and gold and aluminum and all the good stuff. You send them plastics? They'll tear it apart, melt it down, and resell it. There are entire villages who live in piles of our crap, and making their living off it, while slowing killing themselves.
The problem as you've put it, is the health and safety issues. Which returns to why we send it to China to begin with. They don't care about health and safety, so it's dirt cheap. Extracting gold with acid baths? Guess which one is cheaper, the open pools of acid on the ground, or the one in a processing facility with fume hoods, safety equipment, proper monitoring and disposal?
