I have been aware that a lot of e-waste is shipped overseas to places like India, but was unaware that we have a processor here in NSW.

QUOTE: Wade Cawley's love of repurposing electronics started in high school when he would take home decades-old laptops to fix up and reuse.

The now 24-year-old never imagined his hobby would transform into a successful electronic waste recycling service, Rekindle Me, in the NSW Illawarra and Shoalhaven.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-20/e-waste-recycler-wade-cawley-of-rekindle-me/102364354

This video shows Young Wade Cawley who has built an e-waste scrapping business that partners with a company that uses bio technology to recover precious metals:

QUOTE: One ton of circuit boards contains about 100 times more gold than a ton of ore mined from the ground. Now, scrappers like Wade Cawley in Sydney, Australia, are cashing in. He’s partnered with Mint Innovation, a company that uses microbes to recover precious metals from electronics. In a single day, Mint can salvage up to $85,000 of gold in their new recycling facility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGlC0KZr8rY

Good to hear that we have some local processing been done over here.
Not enough is being done across the board in many sectors/industries.
Lots of waste (or poor recycling practices) contribute to numerous issues.

The recent redcycle debacle to name one.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-15/soft-plastic-recycling-redcycle-collapse-new-scheme/103471606

In this cheaply made electronics/gadget world, where it is commonly cheaper to buy new than fix the old, we certainly are amassing a huge amount of electronic and other waste.

Saw this recently, which is good for hard drives which contain rare earth magnets etc:
By intensely shaking a hard drive, a device called the 'DiskMantler' promises to fully separate all of the individual components that make up a spinning disk drive.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-destroyer-vibrates-hard-drives-to-death-in-90-seconds

For security/data reasons, most hard drives are shredded and their components are incinerated after which toxic chemicals remain, and the process destroys the rare-earth magnets inside.

According to https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/what-happens-to-old-electric-car-batteries/

In mid-2023, research by the University of Technology Sydney – commissioned by the not-for-profit Battery Stewardship Council – revealed 30,000 tonnes of used electric vehicle batteries will enter the waste stream in Australia by 2030.

Alot of battery components are crushed down to what they call black mass/black sand (mix of nickel, cobalt and lithium etc), which we currently cannot fully process and refine for reuse over here - so it is sent to other countries instead.

-599 Wind Turbines are approaching end of design life.
There are currently 31 Australian wind farms over 15 years old.
The bits of them that can be recycled are aluminium, cast iron, copper, steel.

It is estimated that by 2034, a total of 15,000 tonnes of blade composite waste (having non-metal components fibre glass, carbon fibre, polyester & epoxy resins) will have been created in Australia due to decommissioned wind farms. Also looks like is expensive to recycle as per this previous report
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/wind-turbine-waste-landfill-recycling-costs/101168442

https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/advocacy-initiatives/energy-transformation/wind-turbine-recycling

Current practice is to bury the blades in large landfill sites.
Newer blades can now reach over 100 metres in length.

In 2018, China implemented the “National Sword” policy that effectively banned imports of plastic waste to protect their environment and develop their own domestic recycling capacity, so this reduced the quantity of our plastics that we could 'dump' offshore, and hopefully forced us to start processing locally.

Keeping our radios, TVs, gramophones, phonographs and turntables going is helping to reduce the waste, and keeping them available for future generations. Cannot say the same can be done for all the newer TVs & radio etc - with systems on a chip - cannot fix.

In the US, most windmill blades go to landfill and they bury hundreds at a time in huge holes. Due to the nature of what is being buried, there will be problems with sinkholes down the track as the fibreglass and timber rot and give way to the weight of soil on top. There are large parts of any blade that cannot be recycled. The trailing edges of the blades wear with time and use and microplastics from this wear fill the air and we breathe it all in. A few companies in the US cut up blade portions to make street furniture with but these operations are tiny compared to the number of blades being decommissioned.

Here, the same is happening but to a smaller degree, given that we don't have as many windmills out there. We also have much the same issue with solar panels. It is economical to strip worn solar panels of their aluminium frames, melt down the frame parts into new ingots and make other products out of them however the tempered plate glass in the panels themselves does not get recycled anywhere in Australia and it is not economical to strip the semiconductor layers off the back of the panels so no-one bothers to. The glass panels end up at the tip as well, alongside blades and other parts which are uneconomical to recycle.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

There are some savage crushers out there than can tear even an engine block to pieces. I fail to see that if sintered why that powder cannot be stored for future use, perhaps magnetically separated but, stored in cells, as, at the rate we are raping the earths resources and covering food bearing surfaces with non recyclables and over populating. It is a race to see what runs out first, to the demise of the other.

Nothing under the current system is sustainable and will invariably terminate.

There's quite a few videos on Youtube now that show those mincers devouring whole cars, engine, gearbox, the whole lot. Whilst it is amazing to see, I am wondering what the attraction is. In places like Germany, there are disassembly lines now, where used cars are taken apart bit by bit and anything recyclable gets recycled. I think they even have laws that state that German cars have to have a certain percentage of recyclability (if that is a word). The same would probably get done in Japan these days, as there is a limit to the age of cars on the road there.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...