@darlicious
E-waste recycling isn't as awesome as most people think. Don't be fooled by the smiling politics and promising startups. The best outcomes they actually deliver usually amount to turning good ewaste into profit while sending bad ewaste somewhere else.
They do salvage a few (very, very few) choice parts for resale and re-use. But most of it is just sorted so that metal and plastic and glass go to the right places. Circuit boards are likely landfill, though in Asia they're starting to grind that stuff down, dissolve it in boiling cyanide acid, and extract the precious metals - gold, silver, copper - before sending the other (hugely toxic) 99% of the mass into landfill. And there's yet another sad industry (a travesty, an atrocity) in the Third World Undeveloped nations which are paid dumpsites - starving people sort through the trash for bits of commodity metal they can sell (they improvise ways to melt batches in their homes and chronically expose themselves to extremely toxic fumes from heavy metals and industrial plastics).
Consumers are strongly discouraged from touching anything after it's arrived at a "recycling" facility. Potential electrical hazards (charged capacitors, batteries, etc), potential chemical hazards (mercury, cadmium, etc), and privacy laws (who knows what amazing data could be found on somebody else's discards). Plus the stuff is just easier (cheaper) to transport and process as intact units, TVs go into the TV pile, phones go into the phone pile, etc - it's extra hassle (time, cost) to go through crates of random parts from random things.
I've serviced some conveyer equipment at an E-Cycle place. I've seen two truckloads of brand new unopened fresh-from-Walmart unsold 60" flatscreens get destroyed for raw materials. It turns out that the manufacturers pay to have last year's unsold stock destroyed instead of paying to have it sent back for upgrades or salvage at the factory - it just costs them less, plus it forces consumers to keep buying the newest items (at the newest prices).
(I also saw a treasure trove of professional cameras, high-end servers full of graphic cards from a Telus datacenter, tons of easily repairable home appliances. Along with bins and bins of smartphones, remotes, dead toys, and other junk. If the intention was recycling and reducing waste then they'd let technicians take the prized goodies before sending it all into the grinder and meltpot. But they don't.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toijA2e1sLw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFfaYc_pIx8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P8_ZoOBmF0
