Making money from scrapping E-waste locally. Gold, copper, aluminum, steel, nickel, platinum, palladium, rhodium, I am talking about harvesting valuable metals from E-waste in expensive countries.
With copper & gold prices on the rise its becoming more profitable to scrap recycle e-waste for metal recovery in Germany & other developed first world economies where expensive labor high wages are normal, not just in improvised waste dumps in third world countries where the wire insulators are burned off making toxic air pollutants such that the scrappers rarely live past 45 years of age.
Many consumer electronics are scrapped out long before EOL or end of life as people upgrade to newer high resolution or faster technologies. Consider a 2012 era smartphone vs models sold in 2023.
Chip makers like TSMC have reduced chipset features from 65 nm back then to only 5nm now. The deep EUV lithography uses a lot of water. The wafer processing for the Apple A15 for example has more than 85 layers where each layer has to be rinsed with ultra high purity water. It 100 units of fresh water to make 90 units of ultra high purity of UHP water used in a chipfab.
This means that large chip fabs uses millions of gallons of water. The chip rinsing water contains heavy metals, toxic heavy metals, acids & bases & other toxic to people the environment components. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm & others spend a lot money & effort trying to reuse water at newer chip fabs.
Water recycling at chipfabs a major target for ongoing development. Especially given that a new model year vehicle contains more than 100 chips. These integrated chipsets like the SOC stack in your smartphone are the most complex product manufactured. We are talking about thousands of miles of wiring in something the size of a finger nail. It's a superhighway of information, bit streams moving around on battery power in your Apple Watch or Apple iPhone.
Using bacteria to harvest gold & PGM like platinum, palladium & rhodium from e-waste at the forefront of E-waste recycling, scrap removing valuable & precious corrosion resistant useful for catalytic converters metals from e-waste.
Newer e-waste contains less copper & gold that older e-waste as electronics OEMs are learning to use less expensive metal in each new generation of consumer electronic. Computer servers & industrial computers contain more copper & cold that consumer laptops & smartphones for example. Many people throw away perfectly good 1080P flat screen TV's because they purchased a larger screen 4K TV and don't have a use case or space for the old one. Millions of tons of e-waste are created because people needlessly buy new electronics when the old electronics still have a lot of useful life.
Sometimes older computers & TVs are put into a shipping container & sent to countries in Africa where local retailers sell used electronics from developed industrial first world countries to people in third world & developing countries. I have met some of these used electronics distributed from Africa in first person when I was working as a repair technician at Batteries + Bulbs in Tukwila, Wa, USA back then.
These African use electronics resellers told me why they were buying large 8D truck SLI batteries from me. In Africa, many people who own a hut install 100-800 watts of solar PV modules on the roof of the hut & needs the big cheap per kWh flood lead acid batteries to store up the DC power from the solar panels, so the 220vac 50hz inverter can take power from the battery to run their fridge, microwave, internet LTE router modem & other cell phone chargers & similar electronic stereo systems & TV's. Meg & I were watching a documentary video of people in rural Indonesia on floating huts that were watching geopolitical content on a large flat screen TV, inside a hut made of reed grass & bamboo harvested DIY and assembled by the home owners.
Where Meg & I live there are many buildings codes & other restrictions that make DIY fabricating a home like that illegal or impossible. As a result housing near where we work horrendously expensive by comparison. This is part of the reason why people in wealthy zip codes give away perfectly working electronics, because the consumer price index of upgrading to something better small relative to their income vs people with much lower incomes in developing countries where cheap improvised housing perfectly normal and common.
I think its interesting that relatively poor people in Africa are installing rooftop Solar PV energy capturing & pumping that current into large format truck 8D batteries so as to provide current too their power inverter too power electronics in their hut.
This means that some poor people in developed countries are 100% solar electric at their home, while the marginalized middle class of America can barely afford the rent or mortgage prices & have not enough money to install solar PV on the roof & batteries & inverters. I do know of some people who live in an RV with a 800 watts of PV on the RF roof, pumped into 3 large SLI31 batteries in a metal rack tray of the floor of the RV that energizes the inverter to run electronics & appliances in the RV or motorhome.
There is an entire Van Life community of people who live rent free in commercial vans in America, in large part because of stupid high rent prices. Our apartment costs almost $3800 per month which is why we are not renewing the lease & moving, to rent a house for less, nearby. Security Properties the owners of this Anthology Apartment are greedy sleazy selfish money worshiping evil people who cannot take the money with them into the afterlife, but seem beset on cheating people with ridiculously rent prices!
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