"You'd rather it was all put in landfill, would you, crun?"
I haven't said I'd rather do anything with it, I was pointing out the limited scope for recycling electronics. It all depends on what you mean by recycling of course, but your own reference is not referring to reusing components (for the reasons I have already explained) but reclaiming some of the raw materials.
Burning off insulation isn't very much more environmentally friendly than tipping it into landfill, even less so possibly. A circuit board is copper, tin, glass and epoxy resin, you can melt it down and reclaim the glass and metal, but burning off the epoxy releases a lot of toxic fumes. Integrated circuits are tin/copper leads, silicon chip, and thermosetting plastic encapsulation. Again, you can melt them down, but burning off the plastic creates more toxic fumes. Have you not watched some of the squalid toxic environments in the third world where our junk is 'recycled'? I wonder how many of those people know what beryllia is, or that it's a carcinogen. Maybe they can't afford to care if they want to feed their families.
Perhaps you should follow up your own reference:
"despite the intents of national regulations and hazardous waste laws, most e-waste is treated as general refuse, or crudely processed, often by burning or acid baths, with recovery of only a few materials of value. As dioxins, furans, and heavy metals are released, harm to the environment, workers, and area residents is inevitable."
S Sthiannopkao, MH Wong:
Handling e-waste in developed and developing countries: Initiatives, practices, and consequences.
Science of The Total Environment Vol. 463–464, 1.10.13, Pp1147–1153
By all means recycle what's safe and practical, but it isn't the answer because you will never be able to reclaim all the materials that were originally used. In the case of integrated circuits you're polluting the atmosphere burning off plastics which are made from scarce petrochemicals in order to reclaim silicon, which is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust.
It's also a mistake to think that carbon free energy is any sort of solution. If our fairy godmother were to give us abundant renewable energy tomorrow we would still just carry on consuming until the next resource runs out. (Forestry, top soil, fresh water, fisheries?) Ours will be far from the first civilisation to collapse as a result of overconsumption of the resources it's dependent on, just the biggest.
The solution to reducing our impact on the environment is to stop consuming so much. It's a scandal that whilst there are people who live on little more than a dollar a day, there are others who throw away perfectly good consumables that are out of fashion just in order to compete for status. It's cruel to the poor to suggest that the solution to inequality is for them to consume as much as we are, when the planet can't support our standard of living for us, let alone everyone else. Despite that, communist China is not only hell bent on catching us up, but they're polluting their own door step providing consumer goods for us as well.
It's doubly patronising to tell the third world that they can't have what we have, because they're damaging their own home in order to provide us with our wealth. We've just exported our pollution to the poor. Even worse, we bust the banking industry borrowing what we couldn't afford in order to pay for it all, and yet the cornerstone of western economic policy is to get consumption back to pre 2008 levels as soon as possible.
There have been a few comments about inequality on this forum, but I wonder just who people think that the rich are. Alan Sugar? Richard Branson? To join the club of the top 1% richest people in the world you need just £500,000, not billions. A house and a pension and will see you well on your way, so it's likely there will be some people on this forum who are among the 1%. I'm not that far off, (2-3% perhaps?) but my consumption totals about £5500 PA.