Electronics recycling con

Electronics recycling is a greenwashing con. A scam. There’s little or no money in e-waste recycling. It’s designed that way. For most people, old electronics are not even worth the bother of bringing to the recycling center. Huge quantities of e-waste lie abandoned in drawers and cupboards: cables, phones, connectors, USB sticks, laptops, iPods, headphones, earbuds, batteries. Many of these are in good working order. And when people do decide to deal with these things, many simply throw them in the standard bin so they end up at the local dump. If you’re a criminal, you can make fast cash dumping e-waste in some poor country. In those countries, if you’re incredibly poor, and you’re willing to cut years off your life to feed your family for a day, you may scrape a few dollars from e-waste. There’s not much money in repair and reuse either. It’s designed that way. And every year it gets worse. All these “sustainable”, “renewable” technologies. They’re a joke. They’re not renewable and they’re not designed to last. Planned obsolescence.

The Right to Repair movement which swept much of the world in the 2020s showed that many people do want to repair things. Apple and other Big Tech brands