Throw away society

The cartoonist Thelwell coined the phrase 'The Effluent Society'.

Not all plastics are made of petrochemicals.

I try and do that,crun.
The reason I am vegetarian is to use less of the world's resources.
I went shopping this afternoon with my son's partner, and everything I thought about buying I decided I did not need it, so came home with nothing.
I have bought no new clothes for over three years. Those I have are mainly organic, so as to pollute as little as possible.
When this computer stops working, I will probably not buy another because I do not really need one. We bought a new television just before my husband died, a 32" one, as we thought we could watch films on it as they came out on DVD rather than going to the cinema like we used to. Hopefully it will last a few more years; it's already lasted longer than petra's did.
The worst thing is all the mobile phones that people exchange for new ones when they come out. I think from what I remember that there are more mobile phones than people in this country. I am not guilty of that.

The thing about recycling, other than whether it is cost effective, is that there is a finite amount of minerals that are used. Therefore if we do not recycle minerals and put them into landfill, they will run out. No more electronics.

That figure of £500,000 is very interesting, crun!

crun

A good post.

Well that's us told crun! All true sadly

"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.

I expect we'll get better at recycling electronic components, just as we've got better at recycling other things. I don't think crun was arguing against recycling electronic components on principle. I think he was just saying it's a waste of time and money at the moment. The economic argument is relevant. If we can't, or don't want to afford it (there are, after all, many other things to spend economic fortunes on, some of them much more urgent) right now, that's just how it is.

Doesn't mean we should stop trying to improve. Nor does it mean we have stopped trying to improve.

Crun says he's an inventor. He just wants all your old tellies so he can make something fantastic out of them.

Crun is right. By the time all the tiny components have been soldered together (in a "clean room", with all dust excluded and workers with their hair covered ) taking them apart again is almost as much work as reducing a cake back to flour eggs sugar and fat, and rescuing the trace of a rare and valuable spice.

I don't advocate dumping them in landfill, neither does Crun I would imagine, but it is not as simple as clicking out one piece and clicking another in. It is not just he large television that is the problem in landfill, it is the cocktail of elements that goes into the circuits.

The alternative is to ship them out in container loads to a developing country, where poorly paid workers strip them down by hand into tiny pieces and anything with a trace of a rare metal is melted down for reuse. In the process they are exposed to a variety of unpleasant chemicals, which does their health no good at all. Workers in this country would not take on the job - well, would you?

The answer is for things to be made with a view to lasting longer than two years! and for buyers to expect things to last and not replace them when a "better" model appears.

Forgot the hashtag

#sodit

Actually I think it's a very good idea to spend the kids' inheritance on a nice big all singing and dancing telly. Go get another one petra. You were probably just unlucky. LG's a good make in tvs.

So just throw it all in landfill and see how much your council tax goes up.

Sounds like crun talks from practice rather than theory. I was interested to hear his take on how public services have become so expensive yet vilified unjustly due to the difficulty in mechanising people oriented activity. I hadn't thought about it that way before. Interesting indeed

Ana. John Lewis have 10 in stock if your interested.
I'm afraid I can't get too sniffy about the throw away society. I'm one of the biggest recipricants.
I won't list all of my second hand buys because it's boring. But the best has to be the conservatory. One year old, £2,000. Reason for sale 'she doesn't like it' But you had to dismantle it. Fortunately we have good friends who helped OH.

www.weeeregistration.com/index.html

The weee directive and what manufacturers and users should do.

"Today the electronic waste recycling business is in all areas of the developed world a large and rapidly consolidating business. People tend to forget that properly disposing of or reusing electronics can help prevent health problems, create jobs, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.[41] Part of this evolution has involved greater diversion of electronic waste from energy-intensive downcycling processes (e.g., conventional recycling), where equipment is reverted to a raw material form. This recycling is done by sorting, dismantling, and recovery of valuable materials.[42] This diversion is achieved through reuse and refurbishing. The environmental and social benefits of reuse include diminished demand for new products and virgin raw materials (with their own environmental issues); larger quantities of pure water and electricity for associated manufacturing; less packaging per unit; availability of technology to wider swaths of society due to greater affordability of products; and diminished use of landfills.

Audiovisual components, televisions, VCRs, stereo equipment, mobile phones, other handheld devices, and computer components contain valuable elements and substances suitable for reclamation, including lead, copper, and gold.

One of the major challenges is recycling the printed circuit boards from the electronic wastes. The circuit boards contain such precious metals as gold, silver, platinum, etc. and such base metals as copper, iron, aluminum, etc. One way e-waste is processed is by melting circuit boards, burning cable sheathing to recover copper wire and open- pit acid leaching for separating metals of value.[43] Conventional method employed is mechanical shredding and separation but the recycling efficiency is low. Alternative methods such as cryogenic decomposition have been studied for printed circuit board recycling,[44] and some other methods are still under investigation."

You'd rather it was all put in landfill, would you, crun?

The scope for reusing electronic components is virtually nil.

Firstly large scale integrated circuits are all application-specific. They're designed specifically to do the job they're used for, and virtually useless in anything other than another identical piece of equipment (which would be long-obsolete by the time anything's getting recycled).

Secondly, components are placed on circuit boards by machines which need components in new condition, with un-deformed leads clean of solder and flux residue, and loaded into magazines.

Thirdly, today's components are incredibly sensitive to damage from static electricity, unless they have been handled in a static controlled area they will be useless.

Fourthly, it's very difficult to remove a multilead surface mount device from a board without damaging it.

Lastly, any process to do this would be difficult to automate, and therefore totally uneconomic.

They have to take them to bits and recycle all the parts. Anything made after 2005 is part of the system, the Waste Electronic and Electrical something or other directive.

I imagine the problem would be quite simple to fix, so they will just put new circuit boards in and put them back on the market, as pompa says. It's just that it's probably better to take them all off the market and fix them all, rather than get a bad reputation.

What do they do with them then? Is there an environmentally friendly way to dispose of a tv?

I do not think they are allowed to end up in landfill any more, absentgrandma. There is an EE directive that all electrical stuff has to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.

Modern electronic circuits contain very few replaceable components and have to be replaced, the cost of their replacement is a fraction of the cost when we had old style circuit boards that had replaceable components.
I worked on the first production TV's back in the 60's, they had 14 PCB's, today those 14 PCB's have been replaced by a few Integrated circuit. Without those Integrated circuits, you wold not be having this chat on your laptop.

The throw-away society is down to people wanting more, more, more, all the time. People are just not content any more.

" Must have been a run on them..."

More likely they have been withdrawn because they were substandard.

Where are all these non-functioning 'throw -aways ' ending up? In a land-fill. And no-one seems to give a toss, as long as they can still dry their clothes without having to step outside , watch TV in 3D on a screen which fills the room and renew their 3-piece suite every time the Furniture Warehouse (or who-ever) has a sale... which is, on average, every weekend.