Nature will recycle us

Another approach common to informal recycling is to wash and dip the e-waste—often using bare hands—in acids such as “nitrates, sulfates, hydrogen fluoride, etc., to create slurry,” Andy Farnell explained.

Gold is extracted by mixing sodium cyanide to run off gold cyanide. Lots of toxic wastewater results from this process. The remaining slurry is dried and buried or burned. It’s very toxic and problematic to handle. Burying causes terrible leaching 10 or 20 years later, poisons the land and makes large areas unfarmable.

If we were serious about electronics recycling, governments would mandate that the minimum number of different materials and chemicals possible should be used in any design. Every time a new material is added to a design, potential damage and harm is added. As the number of materials grows, the environmental damage grows exponentially because of the complex interweaving of the materials. Remember, there is no such things as cost-free, non-polluting e-waste recycling. So the fewer materials and materials types we use—in everything we do—the better. The type of material chosen is critical too. What is the material that does the least damage? If it’s blended, if it’s