China bans toxic American computer junk

Let me just say that I am amazed at the amount of misinformation in this thread, here and elsewhere. The metal quality in modern computers is just fine. The only thing that really has changed is "lightweighting" - basically less material is used. The steel shells might be thinner, the wires may be shorter, and the gold plate may be a fraction of what is used to be. Once the metals are extracted from the computers, none of it is so terrible that it is waste. Gold is gold. Mild steel (minus rust) is pretty much mild steel. Aluminum alloy is still basically aluminum. Some of the metal is basically horrible - but that is reused for castings and still is worth saving. Nothing has changed, other than the amount of computers a scrapper has to junk to turn a profit. It is tougher today, so only the bigger scrapyards are surviving. Folks, there seems to be this idea running computers are not recycled that well, and all sorts of them go to the landfill. This is crap, plain and simple. Computers have the distinction of being one of the most recycled resources out there. A good yard will extract 98 percent of the goodies out of pallets of computer junk they get. Basically, all that is left is wire insulation (after shredding to get the conductors), epoxy-fibreglass (after the boards are shredded to get the copper, solder, gold, etc.), and the glass from the tubes (tubes are falling to flatpanels, so the problem will "correct itself"). Everything else, plastics included, are now recycled. That is probably a better record than soda cans or newspapers. Another point is that basically *all* corporate systems (from hoards of PeeCees to mainframes) get recycled. Sure, they get tossed into a dumpster, but that dumpster does not end up at the dump - it goes to the scrap yard. Likewise, *most* computers left on the streets (with the exception of tubes) end up at the scrappers as well. The garbage collection companies will generally pull out computer scrap and send it to the scrappers. It saves them money, even if they get nothing for it This is common practive in the industry from the dawn of time - when the value of the metal is low, stockpile. There is no mystery to this. The steel mills still pay for scrap steel, as it still is cheaper than making steel from ore. They will not, however, give much for it, and it needs to be in *large* quantities. Modern PeeCees have anywhere from 2 to 13 dollars worth of scrap metals, each. Mostly gold and tantalum. It is worth it, but it has to be done in large quantities. An investment in special machines (in the 120,000 dollar category) is needed to get the extraction to a reasonable cost. Anyway, this whole China ban thing will basically change nothing. It is basically a way for them to keep the worthless tubes out of their scrap system. China needs scrap. Even the cheapest consumer garbage is made out of the stuff. They will continue to buy it in the future - just now we can't load up the containers with tubes. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org