They might as well tear all new construction houses down, they use copper as a termite barrier!

And then we will be using stone age tools, but wait, stone has impurities that could be toxic, so we will be using nothing.

By the time most of the modern LEDs go EoL, there will be plenty of recycle bins around (hardware stores and what not) for you to drop off your bulb and it will then be recycled properly.  Yes a good number will make it to the landfills, but it's no different than disposing of fluorescent tubes via normal trash in my opinion, not enough will accumulate in any one area to cause a haz mat situation. 

Recycling is recovering only part of the materials put in. While for Fluorescent its still about straightforward to separate it all from each other, what about LED (or any Electronics for the matter) ? All those multiple materials put together in complex ways ain't going to be separated anywere soon. And definitely not without even more resources used (or wasted) to perform the recycling itself

Besides, what about all the waste etching solutions, solvents, and whatnot straight from the factory ?

By the time most of the modern LEDs go EoL, there will be plenty of recycle bins around (hardware stores and what not) for you to drop off your bulb and it will then be recycled properly.  Yes a good number will make it to the landfills, but it's no different than disposing of fluorescent tubes via normal trash in my opinion, not enough will accumulate in any one area to cause a haz mat situation. 

There are already a lot of recycle areas around.

Recycling is recovering only part of the materials put in. While for Fluorescent its still about straightforward to separate it all from each other, what about LED (or any Electronics for the matter) ? All those multiple materials put together in complex ways ain't going to be separated anywere soon. And definitely not without even more resources used (or wasted) to perform the recycling itself

Besides, what about all the waste etching solutions, solvents, and whatnot straight from the factory ?

I think they recycle that stuff. Keep using it until it's no longer potent for the job then back to whoever made the stuff. How it's made doesn't cover that sorta stuff so I'm not sure what they do with spent solutions.

Quote from: Ash on July 22, 2016, 03:07:36 PM

Recycling is recovering only part of the materials put in. While for Fluorescent its still about straightforward to separate it all from each other, what about LED (or any Electronics for the matter) ? All those multiple materials put together in complex ways ain't going to be separated anywere soon. And definitely not without even more resources used (or wasted) to perform the recycling itself

Besides, what about all the waste etching solutions, solvents, and whatnot straight from the factory ?

I think they recycle that stuff. Keep using it until it's no longer potent for the job then back to whoever made the stuff. How it's made doesn't cover that sorta stuff so I'm not sure what they do with spent solutions.

Maybe they convert it to something else, to reuse it.

Actually i am more shocked for the use of Copper for this purpose. Isn't Steel like 10 times cheaper and less scarce ? Or do Termites eat Steel ?

It's not structural copper.  The copper is in the form of a wood preservative called copper naphthenate.

I think they recycle that stuff. Keep using it until it's no longer potent for the job then back to whoever made the stuff. How it's made doesn't cover that sorta stuff so I'm not sure what they do with spent solutions.

Recycling the product :

Recycling is not too economical process for many materials, so the companies that do recycling only recover some specific materials from the product - either hazardous stuff (Mercury) or expensive (various metals ?), the rest, or the parts hard to get apart, going to landfill

"Glass and Mercury" lamps are made of relatively few materials, and that are straightforward enough to separate, and can come out quite useable : Mercury, Glass, maybe Phosphors. Everything that can be smashed, mechanically separated, washed with water and dried out. Losses probably include the Electrodes

Electronics are assembled of components on PCB, Epoxies, many small parts made with different materials put together in complicated ways (Electronic components), and so on. So materials that reacted in some way during manufacture and cannot be restored (atleast not without greater effort than making new such materials from new Earth resources), or materials that would simply take too much effort to restore. So recycling of Electronics is quite limited to melting out some metals and thats probably it

For etchers and solvents - Part is recoverable (with varying efficiency and resulting material quality) and part is not



So Electronics are among the worse things in regards to waste from manufacture and quite bad recycle-ability. Makes sense to ask then, why they are so much "greener" compared to non Electronic stuff that does the same function. For example, are Electronic ballasts really so more "greener" than modern Magnetic ones (without stuff like PCBs) ? Or maybe its actually the other way around (especially provided the difference in lifetime of the ballasts) ?