Energy has an environmental cost. If the energy required to recycle is more than the environmental cost it's not worth it.

Collecting small things from many sources over meaningful distances is hard.

Separating things made of many materials is hard, especially when some components are hazardous.

Purifying materials drawn from waste is hard.

These aren’t impossible challenges, but physical facts of the problem that have kept costs too high for electronics recycling to be widespread.

Longer lasting electronics that can be repurposed or reused is the lever I’d be most excited to pull here.

Short answer: it's too expensive.

But us hobbyists can help out. I get about half of my electronic components for free or close to free by parting out electronics that others are throwing away or sending to e-waste centers.

I guess one aspect is that electronics are not one homogeneous thing but often very complex composites of many things, bonded together in a way so that they can resist the temperature etc. that they operate under.

That's very different from say a newspaper, a glass bottle or a Coca Cola can.

Recycling works best when you have a big lump of bulk material which can be melted down and reforged/recast. Aluminum cans are some of the best objects for recycling because apart from the labels they are almost pure aluminum, and so you just toss them in a furnace and get the constituent material back.

Electronics are the exact opposite of this: they’re highly heterogenous, with bits of material scattered all over the place. Also, most of that material isn’t particularly valuable: silicon is literally as abundant as sand. So all you can really do is melt it all into slag or dissolve it in acid and then try to extract the trace amounts of valuable bits like gold, but this is so energy-intensive for so little material that it’s not worth it at any reasonable material price.

bluntly: a lack of regulation mandating that consumer goods manufacturing responsibilities cover the lifecycle of the goods (including end-of-life).

yes i'm fully aware that recycling components is difficult and costly; if you truly believe in the market as an innovating force, you could stand to be a little more optimistic that we could make this a reality :)

This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.

Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.

Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.

Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.

The reason is simply that there are not enough incentives for manufacturers to do so. I would be happy if nothing on smartphones was glued together but everything was screwed or plugged in, and if I could simply replace batteries in smartphones and laptops, as was the case in the past. If these things are not made mandatory requirements, the thinner device, the lighter device, the device where the manufacturer can use battery life as the upper limit for device life will win.

I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.

Recycling stuff is hard, expensive, and energy-intensive. Why should electronics be uniquely recyclable?

We need to get past this idea that just because recycling makes you feel good must mean it IS good. Most of the time recycling stuff uses more CO2 than simply throwing it into a hole and making another one.

repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?

I was shocked to find that even electronics that are collected in Europe seem to be shipped to Africa, set on fire, and at most, metals are collected from the ashes, including traces of gold and copper. That's about it. Batteries have a bit better recycling path but not by much.

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.

It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.

The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.

A big issue is that most electronics are optimized for cost and performance, not disassembly. Once components are tightly integrated and bonded together, separating materials becomes economically harder than producing new ones. Design-for-recycling would need to be a requirement early in the product lifecycle.

Well it seems uneven. The materials in electronics are so varied that there seem to be different levels of recycling, hopefully with materials pricing going up the worst forms of recycling can go away.

China sells a machine for anything you can imagine: Here is a wire grinding machine to recover the copper from wires: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p_hmDdGIk7g

PCBs first seem to be cut up before put into similar machines machine above: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WO-VvucMq4E

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_O1EpEcKaM

Dont know what happens to the ground epoxy resin, maybe mixed with other materials?

Because they are so manufacturable.

When we design these things (which I do for a living) we often find we are forced into tradeoffs between repairability/recycleability and manufacturability/cost. The market wants cheaper and cheaper things. To accommodate we need to make them less repairable and recyclable.

It comes down to entropy and cost of labour. It takes more work to undo entropy turning a complex material mix which is either an appliance still intact or crushed and mixed even more back into its raw materials.

Processing mineral ores into raw materials is cheaper.

So the only way is to regulate market, meaning forcing companies to put in the extra work.

Currently these regulations tend to be circumvented by illegally exporting e-waste into countries with cheap labour, no such regulations or corruption (usually all at the same time).