HACKER Q&A
📣 Zelphyr

Is Anyone Recycling Chips?


With the chip shortage in full force, I would imagine there are literal tons of electronics getting dumped in landfills that contain useful circuitry, including chips. Is anyone trying to recycle these?


  👤 aurizon Accepted Answer ✓
Yes, there is a brisk business in reclaimed chips. There is also a brisk business in fake chips on ebay and aliexpress. Recycling is good as long as done with care and the proper desoldering tools. Some use blowtorches and sell what they salvage to testers and classifiers. Some are heat degraded, some destroyed - look OK, but the heat cooked them - these are sold to the scammers who often sand and rebrand them as more valuable parts. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...

👤 h2odragon
As far as I know electronics for recycling are treated as a high grade ore. Ground to powder first, essentially.

Hobbyist recycling exists, but usually doesn't count in these discussions for some reason (small appetite vs the total amount maybe).

Getting anything useful out of modern electronics isn't necessarily easy; keeping it functional as you pull it is even harder. I'm sure there's room for making the process more efficient but it seems to me there's going to be a lot of human attention required, no matter what you do, and that will keep costs high.

Then when you've got chips recovered, cleaned, etc; you (or your customers) have to test them and verify they're up to specs the original manufacturer may not care to share. Perhaps the OEM could be customers and use their extant knowledge and test lines but those are already full of newer components than the recovered stuff.

Personally, I advocate dismantling everything electronic that has stopped working; when its "if you can't see a problem to fix then you're not breaking it any worse than it was", at least. If nothing else the genius and scale of these assemblies can be appreciated.

Having a pile of "maybe that can be used for something else" parts is a great way to get into electronics, and with arduinos and "maker movement" shops like adafruit supplying know how and glue parts, much more of it can be used than ever before.

Keeping the pile limited to some sane volume helps a lot if you share your home with other life.


👤 mtmail
In my country we have collection points for electronics similar to glass recycling. Vaccuum cleaner, TVs, radios, cables. Actually TVs are too big for the collection points. Those get shredded and any kind of metal is filtered and extracted, down to copper in a cable. I'm not sure it's cost effective, just something to get the recycling percentages higher. Retailers are required to take back electronics and use proper recycling channels. The drawback is automating it and afaik there's nothing special for chips yet.