You might be sitting on a mountain of e-waste that Dell wants to recycle for you:
If you're anything like me, you struggle to let go of your old electronics. Be that a mobile phone, laptop, or even an old graphics card plagued by electromigration and capable of a frame a minute—there's something about the act of disposing of it that feels inherently wasteful. Yet it's no less wasteful of me to keep my long redundant technology stored in a cardboard box at the back of my closet.
Hence when I spotted a tweet from Dell promising to recycle my old electronics— whether manufactured by Dell or not—it caught my attention. Will the company actually take my old tech from me and do something productive with it?
To gather some more information, I reached out to the company. Because it's one thing to recycle your own product, it's a whole other to deal with somebody else's trash, for lack of a better word.
And as I would find out from Page Motes, Dell's head of sustainability, the company doesn't see it that way.
[...] Dell sees that e-waste instead as an opportunity to create closed-loop supply for certain materials.
Plastics are something the company has been recycling for some time now, using 100 million pounds of the stuff to make new parts for Dell systems, but more recently it's also begun leveraging rare earth magnets from old, disused hard drives alongside manufacturer Seagate.
Furthermore, I'm told Dell is now reusing aluminium from the old drives, and this closed-loop aluminium has since found its way into the Optiplex lineup, a range of commercial PCs that probably aren't all that familiar to PC gamers but relies on recycled materials for a large part of its construction. Something it'd be great to see make its way into more discrete PC gaming components, that's for sure.
Dell is first to admit it benefits from the program, and it also hopes that might tempt other companies to follow in its footsteps. Motes explains that it's well-aware this is not something that can be done alone, and that it'll need wider support for recycling programs to really deal with the e-waste generated every year that is, for the most part, not recycled or reused.
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similar_name writes: "The prospect of children printing their own Transformers and My Little Pony toys is a step closer, after toy firm Hasbro revealed a partnership with 3D printing company 3D Systems. The two companies are working together to 'co-develop and commercialize innovative play printers and platforms later this year.'"
[Ed. Note] The first one I would print is Applejack.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @01:58PM (10 children)
Plastic is worth just about nothing. The real value (and rarity) would lie with metals and magnets, if they can be reused or recycled.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:11PM (3 children)
Case in point: (Plastics were banned first, along with a few other things.)
China Bans Foreign Waste – But What Will Happen to the World's Recycling? [soylentnews.org]
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday September 23 2021, @09:56PM (2 children)
Well, once again Futurama gets it right [youtu.be], sort of [youtu.be].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday September 24 2021, @08:41AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday September 24 2021, @10:47PM
Definitely. It'll help welcome you to the world of tomorrow [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:22PM (3 children)
True. Many users of this site probably have collections of 20 year old hardware. The local recycler is willing to take motherboards and hard drives; they can make a profit there. I think they'll take laptops and complete desktops at a lower price per weight, and I suspect they are chucking anything plastic in the landfill.
At this point I'm no longer hounding my father to junk his old hardware. It appears that rare earth metals are becoming even more desirable, and recycling is improving to make that happen. He won't retire off the old HDD collection, but I estimate the payout is growing faster than inflation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Thursday September 23 2021, @06:34PM (1 child)
users of this site probably have collections of 20 year old hardware
I am still using 20 year old hardware (Lenovo T21). 2001 does not seem like that long ago to me.
My "new" laptop (Lenovo T61) is now 11 years old, and ready to start secondary school. Of course it now has an SSD.
I would guess several parts of one of my desktops are a lot older - it still has a 3 1/2" floppy drive that actually works, but
the mobo and H/Ds are only a few years old. Not sure how old my Sparcstation 5 is.
The new stuff is useless due to not having CD drives and 5 1/2 drive bays for LTO drives - I mean who would go
without tape backup?
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday September 24 2021, @11:15PM
Don't forget the Lenovo (formerly IBM) Thinkpad legacy is one of reliability first and foremost. They were pretty hard to kill at their time.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 23 2021, @10:55PM
My server was about that old ... until it suffered the true death this summer and got replaced by one that was maybe 10 to 15 years old.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LabRat on Thursday September 23 2021, @03:06PM (1 child)
This is the way engineering plastics need to be recycled: with original purpose in mind.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:45PM
There are even some recycled polymers that are more desirable than their original components for certain applications (waterproof, high temp, etc.). It can be lucrative, but is not for most "disposable" plastics.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @02:10PM (16 children)
they want your old stuff so you buy new. People will just give up their old electronics to dell and other manufacturers and the used market will go up. Get rid of those pesky non locked down PCs.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday September 23 2021, @03:43PM
Maybe, but the systems they'd get from me are XP era updated to run 7 but they're long in the tooth at this point.
(I agree the locked down system thing is a horror)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Thursday September 23 2021, @05:18PM (13 children)
I personally haven't had a Dell product work long enough for this dastardly plan to work on me. Heh
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @10:40PM (4 children)
I have purchased two Dell Latitudes this year, a 2013 model and a 2015 model.
90 day warranty. I'm using other people's trash before it gets to recycling, as my main machines.
The Linux one works fine with 8GB but I can double that as necessary. I have kitted out the Windows one with 16GB of RAM, something that astonishes me that 'bargain' laptops selling new for hundreds of bucks are crippled by 4-8GB.
Windows 11? Don't need it. A big scary dialog box saying it's unsupported on a 6 year old Core i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM is maybe enough to tell Microsoft to fuck off once and for all!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 23 2021, @10:58PM (2 children)
Can you stuff Windows 11 into a virtual machine where the VM software fools it into thinking it has the TPM?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @06:26PM (1 child)
So unless you have that, which is required by all UEFI SecureBoot implementations (go look it up), your system cannot attest its way to windows 11 full boot capabilities. if Windows 11 mandates it to update or boot, you're screwed. If applications require it to install or be purchased, you're screwed.
Operating a virtual TPM module is easy. But having the signed module keys necessary for it to attest, and getting the response timings right so Windows doesn't think it is out of sync is a major government, corporate, or criminal op only, unless someone manages to get and release Microsoft's signing key (that particular one should be similar in security to Intel ME/Microcode/AMD Secure Enclave, multiple parties required to sign anything, only used to sign downstream OEM vendors own keys, then sealed up tight. If it's not, it needs to be gotten, released, and then legislation passed to ban companies from every being able to lock down hardware through their own signing keys ever again. Cryptographic signatures on firmware is good. The inability to replace or override them to control the hardware you own is not.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:40PM
Before claiming something is impossible, you might want to check next time. Most of the major VM providers and all of the commercial ones offer it.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 25 2021, @02:32AM
My desktops that get regular or everyday use:
2003 - P4 (DOS)
2007 - quadcore (XP64)
2008 - quadcore (ReactOS)
2008 - quadcore (XP)
2014 - Xeon (PCLinuxOS)
2014 - i7 (Win7)
2014 - i7 (PCLinuxOS)
2014 - i7 (Hackintosh/Win10)
2014 - i7 (XP64)
The first and last listed have mainboard/CPU purchased used; the rest are all salvage. Unsupported? Do I look like I care??
And in the next room is a stack of lightly-used laptops of similar vintages, ALL salvage.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. Please, keep throwing out that perfectly useful hardware!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday September 24 2021, @03:52AM (5 children)
The problem with the consumer Dells and HPs I've seen is the inadequate power supply... just barely does the job when new, then gets some age on it and can no longer handle the load, so quits. (Some work fine again if you disconnect some component.) Replace the PSU and all is well again. Does make for a steady supply of "new" hardware out of the trash.
I've got a stack of Optiplex discards that are about six years old, and completely stable. Perfectly good for everyday. Also make a good hackintosh.
Their dastardly plan won't work on me until the hardware quits beyond all resurrection, and there are no more parts left that can be cannibalized.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday September 24 2021, @11:19PM (2 children)
One correlated consideration is (may be) that laptops should comparably live forever, since the power supply is wholly external to the device. If/when it dies, the failure should be obvious and easily replaceable, but I'm not sure if that's generally the case.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday September 25 2021, @01:55AM
You'd think, but that's not been my observation... laptops die at an eyeball estimate of 3x more often than desktops. Might just be too many far-smaller parts in a necessarily hotter space. OTOH, I don't think I've ever seen a dead laptop brick. I have some that were random salvage from 20+ years ago and they all still work.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @02:12AM
I got a cheap laptop for about $100. It was good for about 4 years. Replacing the faulty power supply was possible, but would cost me around $25 to $35. Instead I got a new laptop that was faster and had more RAM for $67. Open box, good as new.
I would be willing to replace the power supply and even the battery for more expensive laptops, if possible. Also, the recent adoption of USB-C charging on laptops could make it much easier to get a generic replacement for the power supply.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday September 24 2021, @11:23PM (1 child)
I think that power supply failures tend to be almost always electrolytic capacitor failure, but I'd need confirmation on that. If that's the case, seems like it should be *really* easy to bring PCs back from the dead and keep them running and happy, particularly with Linux/ChromeOS/hackintosh options.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday September 25 2021, @02:08AM
That would be my guess too, but I dysmangle dead PSUs to extract still-good fans (and have often replaced PSUs' dead fans), and I've rarely seen an =obviously= bad capacitor.... tho the common factor among the dead is very small caps and small or absent heatsinks, whereas the long-lived models have caps the size of your thumb and a whopping big heatsink. Consequently I have a General Rule that no PSU that weighs less than 3 pounds is worth shit.
I doubt it's coincidental that when I hook 'em to a voltage tester, the cheapies usually demonstrate a wider array of sags and spikes. That's also how I became an Enermax bigot.
Tho I did finally have an Enermax croak... to be fair, it had been in service over 20 years. (The fans are original, and still work.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @03:30PM (1 child)
My XPS laptop from 2009 runs Devuan just fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @05:32PM
My XPS laptop from 2021 runs linux just fine, even came with it. The keyboard already has a broken key, monitor gained a dead pixel, the keyboard backlight is worse than useless, and I'm doubtful it will last longer than a few years, much less outlast my 10 year old thinkpads or macbook.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @04:31PM
I prefer to keep my "old but still useful" electronics which no longer receive updates and predate some of the privacy invasions introduced in newer phones.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:10PM
I will keep that , and a couple other old gaming cards stricktly for sentimental reasons.
LAN parties.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 23 2021, @04:33PM (6 children)
I hang onto my e-waste because the Scot in me won't let me dispose of valuable material; One of these days I'm gonna finally clear the block of time to repurpose that old material into something new and cool. As the proud new owner of a decent 3D printer, I'm much closer to that day.
More broadly, many of us have enough material of one kind or another in our possession or in our immediate environment to build what we want. I built a storage loft for my apartment in Brooklyn from lumber that somebody set out on the curb, and a reading loft for my kids using wood from an old bunk bed. Those are just a couple personal examples, but with a little elbow grease and will anybody can do it.
The biggest obstacle to breathing new life into those old electronics and anything else is the fear of "doing it wrong." Get past that and you can do almost anything.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 24 2021, @03:40AM (5 children)
I understand this problem... if I can see a use for something, it's not trash. My own personal weirdo in the repurposing department is an extremely ugly but useful junk trailer that someone in the 1960s made from a 1940ish pickup axle and a couple of metal bedframes. There's a guy on YT who makes beautiful furniture from old pallets. I've seen all kinds of decorative stuff made out of dead computer parts (jewelry, lamp, room partition made of stripped mainboards). The list goes on and on... at least if you don't regard what's already mined and manufactured as disposable.
I do wonder why more sheer-garbage plastic doesn't get melted into lumps and turned into stuff like parking curbs and picnic tables and deck planks, that need only be solid and somewhat strong. Used to see some of that, but not in a long time.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:34AM (2 children)
It's not worth it for many reasons.
Too much of it has some old-time lead solder mixed in it.
It costs too much for the additives to make it UV and water stable.
The inputs are too varied, manufacturers like standardization.
If you just grind, mix, mould and heat it, quite often it will literally fall apart on extraction from the mould. You need to sort the plastics and treat them differently. It costs too much.
Note. You can still buy 'environment friendly' recycled plastic decking, but it's about twice as expensive as buying high quality wood decking.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 24 2021, @03:20PM (1 child)
Thanks... good, if unfortunate reasons. I suppose there are similar drawbacks to using chunked random plastic as filler in say, asphalt? I know ground-up rubber tires were considered for that, and were shown to cause much less wear on passing tires, but nothing ever came of it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @04:19AM
I have no idea why they don't make roads like that, but if it reduces wear on tires, maybe the tire lobby is blocking it.
An interesting Fermi calculation:
How many cars in your city? How long do tires last? How much rubber is worn off them in that time? Knowing those three things lets you make a pretty good estimate of the amount of rubber dust that is scattered around your city each year. It is a surprisingly high amount.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 24 2021, @01:32PM (1 child)
That was you?! I have seen that on the road.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday September 24 2021, @03:17PM
LOL, and here I thought it was unique. :O But if it was SoCal in the 90s, or I-15 northbound in 2014, it may well have been me!
The durn thing looks like it'll fall apart at any moment, has the world's weirdest hitch, and won't back up for shit, but it can handle a serious load and tows great. And it cost me the trouble to go and get it. What's not to like? :D
Funny thing, it greatly resembles my frankenputers....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @07:39PM (5 children)
If they want my stuff so bad, how much are they willing to pay me for it? Scrap metal dealers pay me. PET recyclers pay me. If Dell isn't going to pay me for my junk, they won't be getting any of it.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 23 2021, @08:03PM (4 children)
Pfft, the idiots have been going the opposite direction. You pay to get rid of your trash! Those big box office stores such as Staples, they'll take your old electronics, for a price. They do it in a weasely way so they can claim it is free. Essentially, they insist you buy yourself a gift card.
One item I've had a lot of trouble dumping is tube monitors and TVs. I didn't get rid of them all right away when the flat screens took over, and in a few years, recycling centers all stopped accepting tubes. It hurts to put an obsolete but in-perfect-working-order screen in the trash, but that's the easiest way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @11:11PM (3 children)
People pay good money for tube monitors and TVs now. If they are in good working order and a good size, you can easily make a couple hundred on them.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday September 23 2021, @11:35PM (2 children)
I don't know how true that is. I've certainly seen stories, but I find it hard to believe that the tube monitors and CRTs that everyone was trashing just a few years back are now worth significant money. I can see people paying something for the top-quality gear, but the cheap and nasty tubes from 25 years ago are still cheap and nasty tubes today. If people are really paying money for that stuff, I kind of have to assume they aren't old enough to remember having to actually use that stuff years ago.
Though I do have some Sony Trinitron monitors sitting in a closet that I'm not using, probably will never use again, and only have them because I couldn't just toss them out. Perhaps now is the time to try to get rid of them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @03:34AM
At the very least, hardware hackers will be interested. Decent phosphors and tubes are not so easy to get nowadays. Maybe you can drop them at a makerspace for people to scavenge?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @05:15AM
You underestimate the amount of money people are willing to put into their hobbies and the rise of retro-computing/retro-gaming as a hobby. In addition, the fact that they are wearing out and becoming rare shifts the equilibrium point on the supply/demand curve even further towards higher prices. Sony Trinitron in particular is very sought after for their high quality. Even trash ones can be valuable enough as parts. Check the comps on eBay, FB Marketplace, or your favorite used items sites and I bet you will be surprised. There are a number of communities and groups on various social media that you can find that would snap those right up. But like I said, there is demand for a lot of CRTs that many people underestimate.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 23 2021, @09:15PM (3 children)
As a successful user of Pentium 4-line computer (for editing, office, simple programming, graphics and storage management) and 2007 Core (this first Core, power-hungry one) notebook I can see the objective here.
Te thing is that I don't do AI, I don't do gaming, I don't need HD video as I don't have suitable display. And when I do computations, I connect to a 128-core workhorse which even has no video card and everything goes through ssh.
Dell machine with Intel ME deactivated (not erased! There is a bring-up and initial programming done!) costs 4-5 times the machine with this USA spyware, and is not in open market - you usually stumble upon them when going thru after-leasing stuff or second-hand after some ministries or services. Otherwise it is not possible to get a secure machine.
This just leads to placing users in a situation when they already have government spyware and it is widely used.
So I will still clean this stuff every few months, the only difference is that now I have Linux which looks awful, when before I had Cygwin under WinXP which looked awful too.
Smaller number of working pre-ME machines is the objective for both manufacturers and government, so let's not help them too much.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 23 2021, @11:01PM
Purism laptops have the Intel ME disabled, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:53AM (1 child)
So you live in Mom's basement and don't pay electricity bills?
You'd save shitloads of $ annually by switching out that Pentium 4 for anything newer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @08:59PM
This is not a problem if proper software is used. These chips do have scaling! If You want things which eat power, better example will be late Athlon/Opteron/Phenom series, I used Turion for some time and this was a heater. And many modern configurations eat power because OS has to show cute gradients, 3D rubber windows or mine crypto using JS with web "applications" better called "running untrusted code on your machine".
Also:
- Use a good power supply unit. Many "high-efficiency" units have their efficiency go really low when they are under heavy load, or if they are not loaded sufficiently. The "sweet spot" with nice efficiency is really narrow. Unfortunately I just had to measure through various units to find a good one and it's not a fast measure.
- If you don't do graphics, don't waste power for it. In Linux, GMA950 works suddenly well if no GPU-intensive shell is used. It can even do some CAD.
- Notebook with docking station uses much less power than a full-featured desktop and if a good one is used, you get very similar expansion capabilities plus portability. I totally switched to this configuration some time ago.
I was thinking about switching to "much faster" RPi until I found that its disk I/O is unbearably slow, and clones "with SATA" have USB-SATA bridge or, even more awful, poor GPIO implementation locked in proprietary kernel module. These devices are great as small, embedded systems with nonvolatile memory rarely used, but really poor at work.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @02:02AM
Jews are prehistoric animals ... rather machines or demons that want human souls. Let us make their unholy job as difficult as possible.
Does the recycling smell like the "cash for clonkers" (perfectly working older car destruction) scam?