This Business Insider video on gold recycling just came out on Youtube.
I haven't even finished watching it yet, because the opening minute uses footage of African city junkyards to repeat perposterous claims that African are using a toxic leachate chemical process to extract gold from circuit boards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yGPm1U7U6s
Look, if you are claiming to make a engineering or scientific breakthrough, don't start with a blatantly false and discredited claim. I've been visiting African scrapyards for years.
The gold bearing printed-circuit boards that come from hand-demanufacture and disassembly (an honorable process, superior to Western "Big Shred" machines designed to avoid labor) are sorted by type and either a) reused in ubiquitous repair shops in Africa, or b) sold to Chinese buyers who harvest integrated chips from the boards for remanufacturing (e.g. into lower scale toys and appliances).
The whole "acid bath" claim was bogus since Guiyu reporting in 2002. The claims made about Agbogbloshie and other African dumps (that they import EU and USA electronics for scrap, rather than collect from generators in African cities after decades of re-use) were disproven by multiple research papers over the past 10 years.
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@BusinessInsider is ordinarily a great journalism organization, and the rest of the story may be quite interesting aside from the postulation that white people have better processes.
Business Insider may be forgiven for re-reporting false stories resurrected after the UNEP published findings disproving the recycling export story through an introduction and press release that infamously claimed the UNEP report found the opposite of what it reported (see "Criminal Negligence" parts 1 and 2, published in peer reviewed Discard Studies in 2015).
The more interesting story remains how Europeans and Americans continue to delude themselves that complicated shredding machines, chemicals, and now microbes, are superior to the extended product life given to electric and electronic components in poorer countries.
Interview Adam Minter (NYT bestselling author of Junkyard Planet and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale) if you don't believe me or the academics. It's time for reporters to check the privilege of wealthy countries that have abandoned repair and reuse, and now look down upon the Tech Sector in Emerging Markets, because we cannot seem to tell the difference between valedictorians in electronic reuse and primary school dropouts at African city dumps... Everyone is always being racially profiled by the latter, because it helps the quite white guilt hook which is a telltale sign of lazy reporting.
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