Gordon

I don't say we should recycle everything, but I do say we should recycle 
much, even if it costs more than virgin material, if only to spin out 
our resources longer for future generations. Obviously, metals and 
thermoplastics are the easy things and come to mind. Many metals, even 
low cost ones like iron/steel, have been recycled for a long time (your 
car probably has two or three generations of earlier models mixed in 
with the bodywork, possibly even a tiny bit of Ford model T).

In context with our industry, gold on contacts has been recycled for 40 
years and more, copper also, althhough more sporadically (when I 
directed a PCB Fab plant a couple of incarnations ago, we sold the 
excess copper etching bath for several years, until the price of Cu was 
so low that we had to extract the metal ourselves and sell it as such - 
this was cheaper than sending it as hazardous waste). I see no reason 
why the bulk of solder cannot be economically recycled. However, I 
certainly draw the line at extracting the tin oxide from MOF resistors 
or the arsenic from GaAs semicons.

However, I'm going to raise a red herring, but one which will become 
actual, even if it isn't yet the case. Hydrocarbons. Most of these are 
derived from fossil fuels, principally oil. We have seen over the past 
weeks that the demand for oil has exceeded the global supply, which was 
working at virtually full capacity, up to about 2 weeks ago. Despite all 
our efforts at reducing CO2 emissions, the rapidly increasing demand in 
China, India and several more developing countries means that, within a 
year or two, the supply will be ± lower than the demand. This will 
coincide with the total depletion of some oil wells, so the effect will 
snowball, as will the prices. Expert analysts, such as Campbell, 
estimate that Peak Oil will be on us by 2008, when the supply will start 
to diminish, despite new wells being brought on line and more 
sophisticated drilling and extraction techniques. By 2020, oil from 
wells may possibly meet only half the demand, even if there is no 
increase in the latter. Obviously, if there is no alternative, we are 
talking about prices of $100 - 250/bbl (current dollars) or more. 
Fortunately, there are alternatives (oil shale, sands, synthesis from 
coal and waste biomass etc.) which will become economically viable, 
although the EROEI (energy recovered over energy input) will drop from 
near 10-30 for oil to 2-15 for these alternatives. The only EROEI above 
20 that will be left for us will be nuclear fission. This will lead to a 
whole new ballpark of equations. One of these will be the recovery and 
recycling of as much hydrocarbon as possible for conversion into some of 
the gamut of products derived today from oil. IOW, even the 
thermosetting resins, such as epoxies, will be cracked down to lighter 
fractions, so your hybrid car may well be running on used PCBs which we 
are making and assembling today. :-) Do you agree?

This is getting more and more off-topic for LF, so I'm copying this to 
Environet and invite future discussion there; thanks for the reminder :-)

Brian

Davy, Gordon wrote:
> Thank you, Bev and Robin, for posting some very interesting facts about recycling. What they say to me is that whether something should be recycled may be a complicated proposition, and hence that it is simplistic and dogmatic to favor any and all recycling, regardless of cost and consequences. 
> 
> There are people with an agenda who promote this kind of notion. They may be aware of the facts, but they don't volunteer them.
> 
> And yes, Brian, this discussion should probably be in the Environet forum (http://listserv.ipc.org/archives/environet.html) instead.
> 
> Gordon Davy 
> Baltimore, MD 
> [log in to unmask]
> 410-993-7399 
> 
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