On 12/15/2011 9:05 AM, TeoZ wrote: Fine Print. Warranty may be void under the condition the user applies electric current this product. I think standard caps are only good for a few 1000 hours. You get what you pay for. Ben.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Holm Tiffe" <holm at freibergnet.de> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 11:54 AM Subject: Re: Cheap Chinese electrolytics - a plague - Re: TV -> D-Sub converter possible? Depending how fast (and how much) the junk is recycled it could keep strip mining for new materials down. How much of that old stuff that lasted forever just ended up in the dump to rot and leach poisons into the ground? There will eventually be some kind of compromise for longer life and cleaner 99% recycling.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Holm Tiffe" <holm at freibergnet.de> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 10:08 AM Subject: Re: Cheap Chinese electrolytics - a plague - Re: TV -> D-Sub converter possible? Before ewaste was cheaper to ship overseas I am sure quite a bit of it ended up in US landfills. Sooner or later those landfills will be dug up and recycled since it will be cheaper then digging 5 miles into the earth looking for it, plus anything currently junked will go straight to be recycled and reused.

At 11:06 AM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote: Usually because people don't want to pay to make it easy to recycle. Although mining landfills sounds like fun, I can't help but think that they'll run into things they wish they hadn't found, and then will be asked to clean up those old messes, too. A landfill from the 1990s is a different beast compared to a "dump" in the 1940s. I might want to go mining for tantalum and gold, but I might still dig into an acre of paint residues. Speaking of bursting electrolytics, hasn't anyone developed a quick test to detect the ones with the chemicals? When it first started happening, I heard the excuse it was a case of industrial espionage gone wrong where an ingredient was left out of the recipe. Now it sounds like it's done as a cost savings. - John

When I first saw that cap-inside-cap pic, I thought some classic collector had done that on purpose in order to retain the appearance of the original cans. I thought I'd heard of radio collectors doing that. Then I saw the value of the cap didn't match. - John

At 12:50 PM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote: As evidenced by what we see in many parts of the world, there are people who will now do that picking. Maybe robots will do it more easily and humanely. Similarly, your average waste pick-up company (at least here in the States) is already harvesting as much as is easily picked out by machine or human. After all, they're charged to put it in a landfill, and they're paid to deliver a bundle of cardboard or plastic or scrap iron. In your average modern anaerobic landfill, they're already harvesting the methane from the decomposition of the organics. When you did hit something plastic or metal, you know it is more concentrated than your average strip-mine ore. It might not be what you really wanted to find. Sure, it would be nifty if we could reduce it all to plasma and sort by atomic weight, but I don't think energy will ever be that cheap. Around here, the scrappers and recyclers are always eager when I tell them I'm giving away a few big boxes of motherboards and power supplies. - John

At 03:10 PM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote: Some countries and states have enacted laws to require it. In Japan, for example, you pre-pay a recycling fee when you buy an appliance, and retailers and manufacturers are required to accept used appliances. In my state, Wisconsin, you can't put e-waste in the trash any longer. It has to go to a special e-waste collection site. My waste management company doesn't seem to care if I put a bare metal PC case in the trash. If it showed any wires or circuit boards, I don't think they'd take it. I don't think this topic is too far afield from classic computer collecting. What if a government begins to charge a fee to dispose of old computers, for example? Any hoarder / collector with a pre-existing pile of dozens of computers has a significant liability on their hands. Of course, who would ever get rid of their classic beauties? What would happen if a government instituted a bounty on old computers, so the pile suddenly has more value as recyclables than as classic computers? The price of gold may have already done that. There are many people in the USA who regard any recycling as a direct affront on their way of life and who deeply resent any requirements to sort their waste. - John

On Dec 18, 2011, at 11:15 AM, Toby Thain wrote: It's interesting to see the whole thing framed as a reward/punishment experiment. I don't know how much the grumbling was in the EU when places started charging a Euro for every grocery bag (something I could get behind), but Washington DC practically threw a tantrum when they started charging $0.05 per bag. It wasn't enough to actually change behavior, though; just enough to make people irrationally upset. On the other hand, Whole Foods offers a $0.05 discount if you use your own bag. In the grand scheme of things, it's the same as having a $0.05 fee for providing a bag, but people seem to find it a lot more palatable (on the other hand, they are also all Whole Foods customers, so there's a pretty significant selection bias). - Dave

On Dec 17, 2011, at 11:23 PM, John Foust wrote: Every time I've bought tires here, I've paid a per-tire recycling fee. We're supposed to deliver our e-waste to special collection facilities that are open at various locations about once a month; you can specially request a pamphlet from the garbage authority in Philadelphia that tells you when and where the e-waste events are. It's hardly a surprise that no one deals with their electronic waste properly; I have a whole bucket full of alkaline batteries that I haven't disposed of properly because I can never remember when the damned events are. At least when I lived in Baltimore, I could take it to the county dump any day I pleased and drop it in the appropriate bin. They also had bins for car batteries, air conditioners, refrigerators fluorescent lamps, motor oil and other things that are better dealt with out of the waste stream, and they were all out in the main recycling dump area. I don't see why Philadelphia can't do the same; perhaps I should check to see if there's an alternate solution involving the county instead of the city. - Dave

sounds like baltimore has the correct attitude, which matches the one here in Orange County, Ca. If you make up arbitrary rules about how to treat things and make it difficult to follow people will take the waste out in the countryside and just pitch it. That is what happens in Kansas City where they banned not only all the usual disposal, but have outragous fees on it, and if you can believe it in a fairly fertile region, the ban lawn clippings. It is a total mess. Here we can take our junk to two places in the county and they operate reasonable hours 7 days a week. All waste, paint, displays, mystery chemical, just bring it in and it goes away. There is a limit on the daily amounts, but it is fairly large, and usually waived. I also recycle all CFLs and old style fluorescent tubes as well, though the original reason, mercury is no longer a problem, there are things in those that don't need to go in the landfill. I'd be interested if anyone has any pointers to how to break open and recycle CFL electronics. I see a lot of articles on how useful the switching bits are in those, but I'm not up to speed enough to make use of them, and just toss them.

On 19/12/11 7:38 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote: If I had to name one country that was doing a good job of this, I'd first think of Switzerland (having visited :) --Toby

I reas really suprised earlier today. I have a very cheap small, (5.5" CRT) B&W protable TV/monitor that I use on my workbench for displayiug the output of home computers, etc. It's handy becuase it's so small. Anyway, althoug it was very cheap, it's not too badly made. I am not suggesting it's like a Barco. but at least all the component positons are labelled _on both sides of the PCB_. Connections and presets are labelled, that sort of thing. The only thoign I didn;'t like was that the components were not 'formed' nicely, they had long wires, not fitted down to the PCB (I know, of course, that it's a good idea to space components that disipate a lot of power off the PCB, but not things like disc ceramic capacitors). Anyway, today I had to crack open the wall-wart that powers it, a simple 13.5V (nominal) thing. Crack open being right, it's gleud together. Anyway, I had 2 suprised : 1) The trnasformer hs an internal thermal fuse in series with the primary -- this thing is safer than a lot of wall warts out there 2) The smoothing capacitor in the wall wart (which is a linear thing, tranformer + bridge rectifier + smoothing capacitor) was labeled 105 degreeC. Better than I'd have expected. On the other hanmd they saved all of a penny by not fitting a bleeder resistor, for all there's space on the wall wart PCB for one. I've remedieed this... As do I/ I also have a problem wit h the fact that many of the so-clled 'green' measures do more harm than good. For example leded solderwould not be a polution problem if things werer repaired, and thus didn't go to landfill until they were at least 50 years old... -tony

On 18 Dec 2011 at 20:21, Holm Tiffe wrote: That could be true. Old electronics solder is mostly tin by volume, which is relatively more valuable than lead. Reclamation of the bulk of solder from electronics trash would seem to be fairly simple. On the other hand, we still have tons of lead buried along highways because of years of use of tetraehyl lead as a gasoline additive. In his later years, Charles Kettering as president of Ethyl Corporation spent large amounts of money blocking investigation into harmful effects of organic lead. Since General Motors was a partner in this venture, it's likely that hey're sitting on old documents that could be very embarrassing. For years, bridges and battleships were painted with lead-bearing paints; the water line connecting my childhood home to the street main was constructed of lead. Lead is still being used for roof flashing, fishing sinkers and auto batteries. Simply responsibly processing electronic waste would eliminate the need for RoHS-type solder, I'd think. --Chuck

Alas yes. Perhaps 'idiots' is too strong a term, but it's certainly the case that ther e are very few people with scientific/engineering knowledge making laws. This doesn't make them 'idiots',but it dows mean, IKHO, they whould take advice from people who understnad such subjects. The;'re difficutl to goet over here, for sure. Problem is, there are soem applciations where the replacements are not acceptable. Current limiting resistors being the obvious one... 'CFL' is a common one (Compact Fluorescent Lamp). :-). -tony

Yo uare lucky. Most of the well-warts we get in the UK have no intenral protectio nt all, they rely on the 30A ring main fuse.... I am told that the transformer is supposed ot burn out in a safe way if overlaoded, mu expeirencie si that this does not happen, at least not until the thing has got hot enough to melt the case and emit a lot of magic smoke. It was fiding the thermal fuse that I regarded as a suprise on such a cheap product. I can rememebr the Philips radios and tape recorders with thermal fuses slotted into the intenral mains transofmer, and instructions in the service manual for yanking it out nad replacing it if it failed. The PSU for my Philis G7000 video game (not strictly a wall wart, it's got a short mains input lead on it) has both mains nad output-side fuses and a thermal fuse inside. And in a screwed-together case so it can be repaired. The wall wart for my LogicDart also has a separate (and thus replaceable) thermal fuse on thge PCB, in a screwed-together case. But such things are vey much i nthe minority now. -tony

Yes, it is all about economics, and the way the Yuan is related to the Dollar (*very* lopsided - the two do not exchange like other currencies). The cost of labor has little to do in the big picture, as their productivity is quite low compared to the US, and mostly cancels out the advantage. -- Will

About as soluble as the lead in solder, no? Or does the presence of the tin make the lead more soluble? In any case, it's soluble enough to be a problem. That's why they don't make water pipes out of lead any longer. Not much dissolves, but it doesn't take much. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 15/12/11 11:05 AM, TeoZ wrote: That was the ideal of Henry Ford, I believe. But it is very hard to achieve, and evil, really. There was a time, not so long ago, when things were built to work well, endure, and be repaired. Then China happened. --T