Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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E waste is full of precious metals. You’d think someone would figure out how to recover them.
There are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with a lot of other crap. It's possible to recover them, but nobody is going to do that if recovery costs more than the metals are worth.
'Tis the nature of Economics. -If recycling for money were easy and profitable then it's highly likely that someone would already be doing it really well and competition would be jumping in to reap some of the rewards. -That said, you will always need a 'Pioneer' to pave the way.
People are doing this, but it requires some gnarly acids and a lot of material. Think extracting gold from sticks of RAM with aqua regia. Not sure of the exact process but scrappers do this in some capacity. I’d imagine the waste from these processes is particularly nasty.
Less and less, the last good stuff was made well before the millennium. It costs to put it in there, so manufacturing processes have become more plastic, less metal. Same goes for cars and white goods.