The board is a mine, a sealed glue, and a skip that grows five times faster than the recycle.

The board is three problems glued into one product. The metals: cassiterite, coltan, wolframite, gold — 3TG — from the eastern DRC and the lakes around it. The tin is on the cassiterite page. The capacitor is on the coltan page. Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, 2010, told SEC issuers to disclose whether those metals in their products financed armed groups in the DRC or adjoining countries. A filing is not a bag that stayed out of the mill. ILAB’s 5 September 2024 List of Goods still names electronics among 204 goods from 82 countries produced with child labor or forced labor. The assembly: a sealed controller, a glued battery, a serialised part that the independent shop cannot pair. That lock is on the sealed machine page. The leftover: UNITAR and ITU’s fourth Global E-waste Monitor, 20 March 2024 — 62 million tonnes generated in 2022, 7.8 kilograms a person, 82 percent above 2010. Trajectory: 82 million tonnes in 2030. Generation is rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling. Raw materials in that 62 million tonnes valued at about $91 billion; about $19 billion recovered in environmentally sound recycling. Rare earths: about 1 percent of demand met from e-waste scrap, while the separator is still one country. The dump that takes the rest is Sanitation. This page is the plant that made a product designed to become that dump, from metals that still have a war in the invoice.

The cobalt cathode is on the cobalt mining page. The capacitor’s ore is on the coltan page. The rare-earth magnet is on the rare earths page. The carton without a field is on the forced-labor goods page. The island that makes the leading chip is on the chip that has one island page. You can read more on the keep the spare page about a board that is not replaced, and on the open the machine page about a schematic the shop can still use. A “recycled content” claim that will not open the case is a skip with a logo.

A product that cannot be opened, whose metals cannot be named, and whose scrap cannot pay for the next magnet is not a cycle. It is a mine with a charger.

A person cannot personally unwind a foundry. A person can keep the device that still works, refuse a glued battery as a design, and treat a 1502 filing as a start, not as a clearance. You can read more on the sealed machine page, and on the keep the spare page. Looking at a phone as a pit and a skip, not as a necessity of the year, is the first refusal.