Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

[alexandrehtrb]

I was wondering why electronics and computer parts are so unrecyclable (is there a better word for that?).

From what I searched, only a small percentage of electronics are recycled and those that do, are through chemical processes. Electronics today use plastics and special metals, and extracting them isn't straightforward, because requires energy and big acid digestors.

Is there some kind of initiative on this area, on using other materials or designing chips and boards to be more recyclable or reusable?

[Apreche]

This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

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.

[Pfhortune]

This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change.

If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.

[KellyCriterion]

> always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order

my dev machine for boring CRUD apps is from 2011 :-D

the only thing I upgraded was RAM and a SSD - its a 4x 3Ghz board; it works quite well despite the fact that its 15 years old :)

(honestly, the only thing why I do not switch is because of reinstallig the whole setup)

[jltsiren]

I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.

Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.

[smileysteve]

To put this in perspective, there are huge issues recyling lead acid batteries exposed this year.

I consider lead acid batteries relatively simple with all materials being large and not particularly binding.

But it's somehow easy to outsource this to a smelter with inappropriate smelting, and no controls on worker safety.

So anything smaller, more complex, or more interewined, with things like silica involved...

[brudgers]

Reusing is better than reducing because “reducing” is only meaningful in terms of reducing consumption. The only way to reduce what you already have is either disposal or recycling or reuse.

[porise]

I heard they changed it to 5Rs.

Refuse, reduce, reuse, recyle, rot.

[MadVikingGod]

The ultimate reason is there isn't economic reason so. It cost's a lot to recycle anything, and most electronics would net you almost nothing valuable.

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.

[poyu]

> opportunity to take the bulk components off boards, test and sort them, and sell them in bulk.

I think this is already happening in China for certain components.

[WheelsAtLarge]

True, it's the reason why most items aren't recycled. By far most items are buried or burnt rather than recycled. Our economic system is setup to minimize the manufacturing costs without considering disposal cost unless it's mandated. I don't think recycling will every be a real thing unless disposal costs become part of the overall price of manufacturing an item. Something that's mostly impossible unless it's mandated and people decide that trash is unacceptable or at least needs to be greatly minimized. Thinking about it, maybe at some point disposal cost will become so expensive that people won't buy new items unless sellers pay for trashing them.

[KellyCriterion]

There are stats that in 1t of recycled smartphones is around 200g of Gold, while in mining 1t contains around 2-3% of Gold.

Does this match somehow?

[lgleason]

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.

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.

[lefra]

Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.

Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.

It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.

[oulipo2]

Exactly! That's what motivated us to design a repairable e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com

[kube-system]

I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.

e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.

And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.

[Findecanor]

Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.

For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.

[kerblang]

Try buying an LED flashlight.. when the LED circuitry/bulb goes out, the whole thing's a brick, battery, assembly, everything. You have to throw it all out. The bulb assembly is usually fused to the frame so that it's hard just to recycle that frame.

[AlexandrB]

Seeing LED bulb reliability rapidly degrade as the technology matured was like seeing the Phoebus Cartel[1] play out in real time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

[danrecht]

Collecting small things from many sources over meaningful distances is hard.

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

At some point in the 90s I remember hearing an NPR story about a new startup that was "pioneering" technology that would basically permit atomic/small-molecule level "cat cracking" of just about anything: a furnace that was so hot that everything put inside it broke down to atoms/small-molecules which could then be fractionated off for re-use.

I was so excited. I was so naive.

The idea seems to have gone nowhere.

[tastyfreeze]

Depends on what you are trying to recover. Recovering precious metals from electronics is no more difficult than processing precious metal ore.

[Findecanor]

I think that plastic parts, such as enclosures for electronic devices, should have resin identification codes moulded in them — just like plastic packaging does, so they could be recycled too within the same system.

[filoeleven]

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

Make the tech giants building robots solve this problem first.

[amelius]

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

Capitalists are pulling the lever in the other direction, though. And there's many of them. Or they pay people to pull.

[matt_heimer]

Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.

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.

[xyst]

It should be regulated to make devices repairable and upgradeable.

End soldering of components to motherboard. Make service manuals publicly available. Components sold and available.

[gtowey]

The full cost of recycling things should be part of the cost of the product at the time of sale.

What you would find quickly, is that there is little to no profit on the manufacturing and sale of new devices and the value of repairs and reuse would skyrocket.

Right now companies are allowed to steal money from the future by ignoring the problem of what happens to these devices once they leave the factory. The truth is that they become hazardous waste, and lock away valuable resources inside of trash.

The reality is that there is no real economic benefit to the current model of ever increasing sales of new goods. But the capitalists, as ever, have been extracting money out of it by making the unpleasant, expensive parts someone else's liability. Namely ours.

Riches built from value extraction and arbitrage against the future. And most of us cannot conceive of it being any other way.

[Analemma_]

Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.

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.

[snarfy]

Energy has an environmental cost. If the energy required to recycle is more than the environmental cost it's not worth it.

[adrianN]

That is true but it is unclear why you believe that to apply to recycling electronics. I doubt anyone can put hard numbers on the environmental costs involved.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

If the moon is a folding chair, then pigs can fly.

[nebula8804]

Well it seems uneven. The materials in electronics are so varied that there seem to be different levels of recycling, hopefully with materials pricing going up the worst forms of recycling can go away.

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?

[mahrain]

I was shocked to find that even electronics that are collected in Europe seem to be shipped to Africa, set on fire, and at most, metals are collected from the ashes, including traces of gold and copper. That's about it. Batteries have a bit better recycling path but not by much.

[SPICLK2]

On the upside, at some point the ground in those infamous electronics "recycling" towns will become so contaminated they'll be able to strip-mine for rare earths!

[AlexandrB]

A lot of recycling seems to amount to shipping waste overseas so it can be disposed of in jurisdictions with few/no environmental protections. Pretty sad state of affairs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/waste-recyclables-malaysia-p...

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.

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.

[tonymet]

The concept of Recycling ( nearly all the materials can be reused with little cost or impact) is a myth. There are relatively few consumer products or materials that are readily recycled.

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.

[JohnFen]

True.

In the US, anyway, the recyclable things are paper, glass, steel, aluminum, and asphalt.

[randusername]

I like how threads like this are like a reverse nesting doll. Somebody says the problem is the specific metals, then someone says it is recovery processes, then market forces, then legislation, and I think I spied a comment on thermodynamics.

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?

[tonymet]

tear apart even the most primitive device with a plastic shell, lcd , pcb and power supply . None of those separate components are easily "recycled" .

The concept that materials are Recyclable by default is just a myth. It's very hard to turn waste into a refined and usable input material to produce another quality product that meets consumer expectations.

[JohnFen]

Short answer: it's too expensive.

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.

[emsign]

It comes down to entropy and cost of labour. It takes more work to undo entropy turning a complex material mix which is either an appliance still intact or crushed and mixed even more back into its raw materials.

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).

[westurner]

Electronic waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269481 :

> From "Turning waste into gold" (2024) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240229124612.h... :

>> Researchers have recovered gold from electronic waste. Their highly sustainable new method is based on a protein fibril sponge, which the scientists derive from whey

/? e-waste: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"“Toasterlike” Process Recovers Rare Earths From E-waste: Flash joule heating can recover important magnet metals" (2026) FJH https://spectrum.ieee.org/rare-earth-minerals-recycling-ewas...

Hydrogen plasma and hydrogen cold plasma can recycle plastic with less energy than FJH, FWIU.

I have some notes on a semiconductor fabrication process with just sustainable inputs: Ethyl Lactate, Lignin-Vitrimer, Nitrogen, CO2, Laser-induced Graphene, A-CNT, PCLP Photo-cleavable Lignin Polymer, Hexyl Cellulose

But A-CNT need to be encased in something to prevent health hazard if they burn. Phytic acid from e.g. Bran seed is high in phosphorous which might prevent health risks of CNT.

[alexandrehtrb]

> I have some notes on a semiconductor fabrication process with just sustainable inputs: Ethyl Lactate, Lignin-Vitrimer, Nitrogen, CO2, Laser-induced Graphene, A-CNT, PCLP Photo-cleavable Lignin Polymer, Hexyl Cellulose

Yeah, I was thinking of something like that. If there are fewer chemical components, recycling gets easier.

[pibaker]

If you buy ICs from a Chinese source, there is a good chance you will get something desoldered from e-waste. People don't like it unless they have no choice because there is less guarantee it actually works plus there is the ick factor.

Anything less valuable than an IC is probably not worth the labor required to recycle it.

On a side note, it is funny to see posters demanding that the company pay for the full recycling cost of their devices. We required the nuclear industry to do the same with nuclear waste and reactor decommission. The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical to built nuclear so we ended up burning more coal instead. Be careful with second order effects of your feel good solutions to complicated problems.

[macarabaua2k26]

> The result is artificially inflating the cost of one of the best ways to cleanly generate electricity to the point that it became uneconomical

Source of this?

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Recycling stuff is hard, expensive, and energy-intensive. Why should electronics be uniquely recyclable?

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.

[adrianwaj]

Interesting stuff about monofills and green concrete here [1].

Leaching is the big issue. Recycling solar panels is going to keep getting more important. Maybe if there was a way to lock-up the metals with additives [2], or make everything a mushroom substrate?

"Mycologists estimate that we have only catalogued about 5% to 10% of the world's fungi." There's probably some solutions in that world. [3]

[1] https://gemini.google.com/share/a32152a6e84e

[2] https://gemini.google.com/share/9ba36745ea5f

[3] https://gemini.google.com/share/c4682c734b15

[adrian_b]

Everything is very unrecyclable, because there are no laws forcing true recycling.

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.

[steve1977]

I guess one aspect is that electronics are not one homogeneous thing but often very complex composites of many things, bonded together in a way so that they can resist the temperature etc. that they operate under.

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

[irishcoffee]

Did you know only about 5% of plastic in the US is recycled? The rest is floating in the ocean or not degrading in landfills.

Plastic.

[kube-system]

I'm surprised it is that high. Plastic is cheap to produce, and the quality of plastic from US recyclers is poor. It is so infamously dirty that China banned importing recycled plastic from the US. By the time you wash the peanut butter out of each peanut butter jar, you've spent more in water and labor than the plastic is worth.

But ultimately, landfills are a good place to put plastic. It sequesters the carbon and keeps the pollution contained.

[tonymet]

not sure why this has been downvoted. The real answer is "nothing is".

[allinonetools_]

A big issue is that most electronics are optimized for cost and performance, not disassembly. Once components are tightly integrated and bonded together, separating materials becomes economically harder than producing new ones. Design-for-recycling would need to be a requirement early in the product lifecycle.

[lacker]

In general electronics aren't recycled because people don't care about recycling them.

The easiest piece of electronics equipment to recycle is probably an iPhone. You can give an old iPhone to Apple and they will recycle it for free. But still most end-of-life iPhones are not recycled.

[iancmceachern]

Because they are so manufacturable.

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.

[makapuf]

Infortunately, this is where free market stops being a good optimizer and manual settings (laws) need to apply by requiring raiparability, which is difficult (but not completely impossible) to quantify.

[AngryData]

If things are hard or impossible to repair, that means they are even harder and more impossible to recycle. If we built devices to be repaired, not only would less of them get trashed to start with, but the stuff that does get trashed would be much easier to recycle.

[erelong]

Probably more nonprofits could be started that just cost extra money to recycle stuff (like, you might not be able to make it into a business where the recycled stuff pays for itself, but people might be willing to pay to prevent e-waste from being created)

[pkilgore]

Not to be glib, but the second law of thermodynamics.

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.

[marcosdumay]

The second law of thermodynamics is very forgiving here. It's actually not the problem. Energy depends on the log of the concentration.

The problem is with our technology; we don't know how to recycle things well.

[MengerSponge]

Thermodynamics: it's hard to unmix cake batter.

[bbyford]

then we should be making legos, not cakes...

[nottorp]

Because someone at Apple still has a fetish for thinner than it's actually needed, and the other manufacturers just copy that.

[xyst]

recyclable and reusable aren’t profitable for companies. They want you hooked on buying the latest incremental/minute change.

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.

[grigio]

Because the States and the "Green" companies earn more money reselling the entire product again instead just the parts

[main-protect]

I suppose it's because it's too complex and requires too much effort to unravel.

[lgleason]

repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?

[GuinansEyebrows]

bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).

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 :)

[Joel_Mckay]

You obviously are not in manufacturing.

USB-C charger reuse is now common (Apple chargers still gets the UK/EU law exemption)

RoHS prevents Pb content in recycled parts (less toxic waste)

Lithium battery recycling drop bins are next to the store entrance (financial incentives)

ATX12V/EPS12V power supply in your PC is a standard component between motherboards

Aluminum and steel instead of plastics is common (consumers like the aesthetics too)

Under the guise of recycling, problems arise when third-world people use vats of acid to strip trace gold/platinum from electronics. Others strip, relabel (laser marking), and resell aged chips as new stock... this can cause safety/reliability problems.

Some firms now use solder centrifuges to extract RoHS solder off parts, and resell the tin bar-solder back to manufacturers.

e-Waste can be a desirable resource, but few people want old Lead contaminated CRT or mixed plastic filled with inserts etc.

Companies like AMD with AM5 compatibility across chip generations should get an award for their great work reducing waste. Linux <6.0.8 kept a lot of laptops out of the landfills too, but now kernel >6.0.15 will no longer support old GPU/Laptops as NVIDIA ends legacy driver support. =3