@Korth wrote:
I'm sometimes called in to do equipment/maintenance work at a local eCycle plant. I can't divulge specific details (because NDA obligations) but Telus is one of eCycle's largest contracts... bins and bins of high-end datacenter stuff, consumer remotes, and cellphones, cellphones, cellphones. Some old, some new, some used, some still brand new in packages which never even got a chance to touch a customer before being replaced with newer models - it's all counted in terms of percent yields and raw tonnage - eCycle removes all the nasty hazards (like mercury, cadmium, radioisotopes) which can pollute landfills, it extracts and sorts all the most valuable parts for material remelt, it smashes everything else and just pours it into dumptrucks. It's pollution control and material salvage, not recycling in the way consumers usually think.
So some small percentage of the precious metals and rare earths in this year's fancy phones might end up in next year's fancy new phones, after being boiled in cyanide acids and smelted at a foundry. But technology built out of common stuff (like silicon) is just garbage, it has no intrinsic value as technology when dealing with the huge bulk quantities that a company like Telus deals with.
Brings back memories. While with a former employer, we built customized telecoms gear for Nortel for a particular project. When they decided to terminate the project a few months later, we tried to back back the equipment to use it elsewhere. We were told that it had already been crushed and sent to landfill.
This is why I'd much prefer to see old phones go to useful causes. But, failing that, responsible disposal is better than simply throwing them into garbage.
