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A recycled laptop's journey, Part 2: Doing the job right
Precious, rare earth and base metals -- such as indium, lithium, bismuth, ruthenium, platinum, nickel and gold -- are essential to producing PCs, and prices for them have been rising dramatically in recent years.
Their higher prices, along with advances in recapturing them from e-waste and the development of a supporting recycling industry value chain, is making recycling more economically feasible.
Part 1 of this series (posted on January 4) looked into the issue of PC recycling, and the dumping of obsolete machines in African countries, and following the course of a hypothetical laptop through the recycling process. Continuing down this path, this part will consider another situation: Laptop owner Joe Verdi doesn't own a laptop from a brand name OEM with a take-back program.
He wants to recycle it and he gets lucky, or is clued-in about the shady global trade in e-waste, and he finds an honest, ethical PC recycler in his area that's going to do the job right. The laptop will likely follow a similar path if it's turned into any of the take-back, recycling programs run by major laptop manufacturers.
