Question by Dina Ahmed: what is the difference between mining in electronic waste, and recycling in electronic waste?

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They can be essentially the same thing, but it depends on the individual person. Responsible recyclers, that harvest metals of interest from electronic “waste”, have connections to people that can take their unwanted left-overs (i.e. plastics, the circuit boards-minus the metals, etc) and further recycle them into a usable product. A responsible “miner” knows the chemistry well enough that he does not create more environmental pollution by simply letting the (most commonly) nitrogen oxides “fume” into the atmosphere while dissolving the metals. Not only is it responsible to capture these fumes, but re-generating the respective acid by capturing it’s fume, ends up being more economical too! Knowledgeable, and responsible miners also tend not to just “dump” the left-over solutions of acids, and/or unwanted metallic salts. Instead, they find a use for them.(like maybe processing a left-over metal nitrate in solution into its metallic form, and regenerate the acid) Basically what I’m saying is that a responsible “miner” doesn’t produce any appreciable amount of waste and is just simply a stepping stone in the process of recycling. If you send electronic “waste” to a recycling plant, chances are that they have their own team of “responsible miners”. Some metals in electronic “waste” are considered precious, and in the end, they all get re-used anyways. It just depends on by whom, and at what cost to the environment.

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