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.
(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.