If they were serious about recoving all those resources, the solution is obvious : offer money for the unused phones.

But yeah, that costs money.

Or, release updates for the bloody things so they don't have to remain "unused & unloved" in the first place.

That would make more than a "modest dent" in the totally-avoidable-waste-mountain-of-their-own-making.

...are they paying me for my obviously valuable stock of those resources?

Or, as I suspect. Are they going to relieve me of them out of the kindness of their hearts, and "for the planet."

How about I hold onto them until they pay back some of the extortionate,inflated price I paid for them. They are doing me no harm sat there.

people are stupid and while most will laugh at the GREEN ads and GREEN boxes and GREEN 'free to return' jiffy bags, there's enough idiots with bricked bricks cluttering their drawers to fall for the GREEN and return their bricks - for free. Just a matter of figuring out how to BEST 'sell' them this idea of GREEN and make the recovery as cheap and effective as possible, and then, voila, new GREEN revenue stream. Every little GREEN helps!

So AC your solution is?

Yeah, thought so.

So, first. Please make your posts make sense. Littering them with capitalised letters in your green crusade do nothing for you. Post as a person. You seem to realise this is a rant so have posted appropriately.

Why is me choosing to keep things I have paid for a problem? They are not littering, I am not sending them to landfill. Why is me expecting the companies, that sell these things for excessive profits, to offer something in return for what essentially, is just them saving money instead of having to dig it out of the ground. If they were serious about "green" they would never have made the things unrepairable. These companies are only about profit and want the rare elements from these things cheaper than they can dig them out of the ground so they can continue to rake in the excessive profits.

My "green" is my own businesses and I am proud of it since I've been doing it since I was a whipper snapper. I did not need to wait for this "woke" mentality to do what I knew was right, so take your crusade elsewhere.

It is often the case with distributed valuable resources the cost of collecting and processing plus the cost of disposing of the useless bits can be higher than the value recovered. To make money out of it you want someone else to collect them into a huge pile you can mine.

First there was Christine, now we bring you - Siri!

You'll know her by the music she plays as she drives you to your doom.

I have a couple of old mobiles around. I'm not letting anyone have them until I know all of my data has been permanently removed. Any Reg readers know the best way to do that to around the same security level as a lump hammer and cold chisel to a hard drive?

I think you've answered your own question there.

It's the only way to be sure.

What about old usb memory sticks, sd cards etc with insufficient capacities / performance.

I think my pile of them almost matches old mobiles.

And then there's old 3.5inch (and 2.5) hard drives. They do exceed mobiles in terms of weight.

I don't need paying for it if I know it's properly & responsibly recycled (including turning all the 1s into 0s to go into new devices).

> because transferring a device to a recycler is no guarantee it will be recycled

Indeed. Unfortunately most of the collected "to be recycled" stuff ends up in (often illegal) landfill, once the recycling company has collected whatever subsidies there were to have.

There is no money in really recycling (as in "preventing things from ending in landfill"), because it is extremely expensive to do properly and cleanly, while the market value (and quantity!) of the resulting recycled materials is low. Collecting all those phones all over the world, taking them apart and extracting all those metals will cost way too much to be profitable, which is why everybody agrees on not doing anything.

Odd because my last work actually had a recycling unit for computers, printers, monitors etc.

If you think they have hundreds of people sitting there taking them carefully apart you are misguided.

You take pc, remove battery, love whole lot in huge bit of machinery and few minutes later you have several piles of shredded metals, plastics and glass.

> If you think

I don't think anything, it's just I've seen trucks and trucks of supposedly "recycled" equipment being dumped in some remote place in the boonies. Now of course I might have chanced upon the one and only cheater in the whole world, but I actually don't feel that special.

I agree some stuff gets recycled, but I'm afraid it's just the easier and more profitable parts. How much of those piles of shredded metals, plastics and glass get really recycled (in reality, not in theory!), and how much gets trashed because it would be too expensive to separate and there is no profit in selling that specific recycled material?

I sincerely do hope you're right and I'm wrong, but I'm afraid we're (still) far from avoiding potentially useful resources becoming creeping pollution.

Why do people keep focussing on an element that isn't actually required for building batteries?

There's enough plutonium to build 15 car batteries as well - which is the same amount as would be required to build 30 billion.

Less than 5 seconds searching.

https://www.drivingelectric.com/lithium-and-cobalt-for-electric-car-batteries