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In other countries your definition of hazardous is an acceptable risk. My mother tells me stories of people rooting through garbage in the Philippines. I also went to my local freegeek (and won't go back again because I can't tolerate the low quality air). Also, in Ghana a bunch of electronics gets processed by people (and they are quite toxic) from our consumer electronics. From this article it seems like they were able to salvage computers (at a considerable risk) See https://medium.com/@felipearaujo22/i-was-looking-for-africas...

I don't know why people throw away their consumer electronics. I got an Original iPhone for $5 and sold it back to AT&T for $100 trade in credit (this was in 2012). I also used the phone on their 2G network for six months and connected to local WiFi.



There are different levels of hazard. Reprocessing electronics is not as bad as finding electronics amongst used hypodermics and discarded rat poison.

What do you think AT&T did with the Original iPhone?


I have no idea. The purpose of the offer was to get rid of 2G cell phones of their network.


That level of risk, and cheap labour, makes mining landfill easier to do.

Here's an example of recovering gold from MLCC (a type of surface mount capacitor): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UoIU6Ef-o




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