Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends There's gold in them thar piles of old Windows 10 PCs. Quite literally, according to recyclers. Gold worth more than £1.6 billion could be recovered from UK devices obsoleted when Microsoft discontinues free support on October 14, according to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) experts at Businesswaste.co.uk. …
Indeed, It's a little harsh to call the PCs obsolete. Then consider them only in terms of scrap value. They're only obsolete to those that absolutely have to run Windows 11. For anyone else, we could call them 'a perfectly functional PC'.
I'm looking forward to grabbing a couple that get binned by customers. I'm not sure how much longer the 16/17 year old Vostro I have in my garage can withstand the spiders that call it home.
All my computers are recycled. Mostly Dell Latitudes and Precisions. Upgrade with SSD and max out the RAM is my standard upgrade, then install Mint. Works better and zippier than Windows ever did, even when new. Off-lease or commercial discards are cheap and can often be found on auction sites or local electronics recyclers. All of mine have been well looked after and are nowhere near end of life.
I got a few Thinkpads from my wife's workplace, and there are some companies that sell refurbished Thinkpads (a quick search will point you that way). Sure, there's always the issue with machines from an unknown origin (what hides in the BIOS?), so there's that. The Thinkpads just... work. They support WPA3, they are (still) fast enough for normal stuff, the keyboards of the old ones are pretty good, full selection of ports etc. I'm running Devuan on my machines, other distros will wor as well.
Most are so terrified by WEEE regulations that they invariably dispose of them at some cost via "approved recyclers", which means something that could be worth £50 ends up being sold on for £200 or scrapped. WEEE regulations have made it quite uneconomic in many circumstances to re-sell unwanted kit. The people disposing of them are (possibly rightly) terrified of data salvage and don't know how to wipe an HDD/SSD so rely on the "authorised, certified recyclers" to do the data destruction for them. Mostly by shredding the storage, not wiping it for re-use. You might still find PC/Laptops at car-boot sales, sometimes even with the HDD still inside and all the data on it!
The only place around here is the other side of Plymouth and is part of the council tip. Despite the badly drawn cartoon cat telling me to recycle my electricals NOW. I would love to recycle my old phones and gadgets that no longer work but no one wants them and to join the exhaust belching queue to get rid of an old game boy and some batteries seems to defeat the object of saving the planet.
Same here. The "onerous" booking/appointment service the tip/recycling centre introduced during COVID that so many seem to complain about to stop the huge queues forming seems to have worked really well here. I've not had to queue up once since then. We can book up to 3 visits per month, but for me it's more like 1 visit every 3-6 months.
"Microsoft is not the baddie here," he concluded. "They've given plenty of notice... "
What a ridiculous, fatuous, and downright idiotic remark. They are the baddie for obsoleting usable machines, via unreasonable hardware requirements, in the first place. If I gave 24 hours notice of the intent to murder someone, that wouldn't get me acquitted in Court.
Microsoft really ought to be held to account by government for the consequences of their stupid decisions on W11 hardware. Sadly that won't happen
Microsoft really ought to be held to account by everyone for the consequences of their stupid decisions on W11 software. Sadly that won't happen
There. Fixed it for you.
Personal experience: My 3 yr old laptop was "upgraded" last weekend. It's now dog slow, more eye-candy, less usability or configuration. WSL seems better though. After startup, it starts teams and a few background processes and "idles" at 16GB (out of 32GB) memory use and 30%-50% cpu usage. There's bugs with its handling of virtual desktops whereby it randomly switches to another. OK it's nice that it shows the name at the bottom of the screen just after switching but not cool when the display switch was uncalled for.
My 10 yr workstation running an "obsolete" version of linux (also employer provided) is still going strong.
My 2c.
In most cases the hardware requirements are also completely fucking stupid.
I have a small fleet of second hand Intel NUC's for tinkering around with.
One of the newer ones is a NUC7i7 marked on the case as new in March 2021, so 4 and a half years old. Despite having TPM 2.0, Microsoft say Windows 11 cannot be installed as the CPU isn't supported. As far as they're concerned, this perfectly usable and performant computer is e-waste at under 5 years of age.....! Still, that's one less telemetry stream for M$ to harvest as it's happily running Debian 13 instead.
"In most cases the hardware requirements are also completely fucking stupid."
Which is easily demonstarted by the performance after Linux has been installed. Windows is now a "content delivery system" and I've yet to understand why hardware that is unusable by Windows works so well when another OS with equal abilities is installed.
I came here to say the same thing.
In what other industry can perfectly working items be obsoleted on a whim of a company?
Sure, I don't expect them to keep updating the old versions with new features, but bug and security fixes should be continued (otherwise the goods were not fit at the point of purchase - why reward them for shoddy code?)
The forcing of other arbitrary changes to force people to upgrade sounds like a monopolistic abuse to me.
Shame on anyone who updates software to work on win11+ only.
Hardware should be replaced when it unrepairably breaks, or is legitimately not powerful enough for the task at hand, not because companies want to sell more stuff.
I suspect that Microsoft will not see a huge difference in their income as a result of the introduction of Windows 11. After all, systems that support it can upgrade for free, and OEM pre-install deals with PC makers probably don't earn them very much considering the steep discounts compared to the retail price.
What I think they're doing is forcing people onto a version of Windows that will make escaping many of their newer and more lucrative subscription services harder to avoid, while doing a data grab of their user's data for LLM training.
Their aim is to move users away from one-off purchases of office and other software, towards pay-month-by-month services. Once they get there, they can essentially do nothing while still raking in the money from people who have no choice but to pay.
> Their aim is to move users away from one-off purchases of office and other software, towards pay-month-by-month services
You nailed it there, get a nice, steady revenue stream without which the punter cannot access their files PROFIT! LOTS AND LOTS OF PROFIT!
In what other industry can perfectly working items be obsoleted on a whim of a company?
Pretty much every industry. We just work in this one. Capitalism isn't just confined to IT.
(If by 'obsolete' you mean 'won't run their software but is otherwise completely useful').
Lets be fair though, none of these machines are obsolete, Windows won't stop working, it just won't be updated; and Linux or Windows server can be installed to keep it usable.
Maybe we should spin it on it's head? Which industry mandates a manufacturer keep updating an item that another manufacturer has supplied that they just provide a component of; for free (when it's none safety critical).
(otherwise the goods were not fit at the point of purchase - why reward them for shoddy code?)
What were they not fit for? Did the computer not do what it was intended for when bought? If you mandated that manufacturers had to ship bug free code you wouldn't have any software. People shouldn't be rewarded for 'shoddy code', but large complex software will always have bugs, just as large buildings have problems and complex machines do too. That's just the way it is.
While a lot less environmentally harmful than virgin gold extraction, gold recovery from electronics involves its own brew of toxic and harmful chemicals.
That's just the gold.
Then there is everything else that is left is PCs being scrapped for no other reason than Microsoft's ego trip (and greed).
Looking around the net there's some reason to think that a typical 5-10 year old computer has about 0.1-0.3g of gold and of palladium, and maybe about 1g of silver. So gross value is around £10-30 of gold, £3-9 of palladium and a quid's worth of silver. I'd imagine that the value of steel and any other metals would probably be offset by the cost of licenced waste disposal of the non-recyclable parts.
So that's looking like about £22 of precious metals gross, before the costs of processing to recover them.
The property I have in Nevada came with mineral rights, and a shit-ton of old mining equipment, including devices for separating metals from ore.
I also have a bunch of ancient, obsolete, battered and b0rken PC[0] boards of various vintages, and other detritus from several decades as a consultant in the industry.
I've been fiddling about with separating the heavies from the junk (mostly fiberglass), and have settled on first running the boards through a hammer-mill that turns them into bite-sized chunks, and then a second hammer-mill that beats on those chunks until they can fit through a 1mm screen. Follow that by a trip over a shaker table for the resulting gritty dust, and you've got a fairly reasonable way of reclaiming your gold, silver, copper, etc. Liberal application of water both keeps the dust down to a bare minimum, and moves the stuff along. The water can be recycled after passing through a settling basin, so there is minimal waste there. I am manually moving the scrap between machines, but there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to feed the output of one machine into the input of another, and adjust feed rates appropriately. Perhaps adding a magnetic separator would also be prudent ...
Note that hammer-mills are quite noisy ... your neighbors won't be happy if you decide to take this up in your shed.
Note also that smelting out the results isn't for the faint-hearted, and can involve hazardous chemicals ... but you can probably find a scrap metal dealer somewhere near you who will be willing to purchase your concentrates. I have no idea where to get rid of the fiberglass leftovers. It's considered hazmat, for what should be obvious reasons.
CPUs and RAM I keep for resale, but they can be run through with the rest. I sell old hard-drives to people who make clocks out of them. I haven't figured out what to do with power supplies yet, but they can be fed into the hammer-mills ... the only problem is the finely powdered wet steel that results rusts almost instantly, thus making a mess, and taking them apart to remove the steel costs more than the scrap value of the metals they have in them (maybe separate out the steel with magnets between the two hammer-mills?).
I have no intention of doing this for a living, I was only curious how easy it can be. The answer is apparently "very", so I'll toss it over to all y'all. If anybody wants to go urban mining, have fun.
[0] That's printed circuit, not personal computer.
I fear this is a bit like the "move to the South of France and make a nice living growing lemons" idea. Like a Ponzi scheme, it works for the first few but (i) there isn't enough room (or machinery etc) for everyone to do it and (ii) once everyone cottons on the bottom drops out of the market.
The way to make money out of recycling here in the UK seems to be: charge bottom of the market rates for carting stuff away; pile it up in huge heaps; wait till it catches fire, as it mysteriously but inevitably does; disappear abroad and leave someone else to clear up. Bonus points for renting the land from gullible landowners who end up with the bill.
The way to make money out of recycling here in the UK seems to be: charge bottom of the market rates for carting stuff away; pile it up in huge heaps; wait till it catches fire, as it mysteriously but inevitably does; disappear abroad and leave someone else to clear up.
Or, pile it in huge heaps, ship it abroad to somewhere very poor with no effective regulation, not much democracy, in return for a bit of paper from a Poorland prince promising that it'll get state of the art recycling in his country. And once it's left this country, relax and enjoy the fruits of your green labours.
"I have no idea where to get rid of the fiberglass leftovers. It's considered hazmat, for what should be obvious reasons."
And there's the main problem with cottage industry recycling of apparently high value stuff. The left over hazardous waste that costs money to dispose of. In most civilised countries, you can just burn or bury it, at least not legally.
I can imagine stuff going through a 1mm sieve would include some which were recognizably copper, at least, tinned copper. But given that the precious metals are going to be thin coatings they're still going to be a small enough proportion of whatever they're on to make it easy to sort from stuff that doesn't have any.
The hammer-mills seem to flake away the precious stuff quite nicely, at least for the most part. It would appear the bonds involved are quite weak. Remember, this stuff can get pulverized down to microscopic.
Also, look up how shaker tables work, and how finely they can be adjusted. It's a density thing, not a size or weight thing. The heavies are so much denser than the base junk, that even a little bit of gold left on a pin can be enough to push it over the edge into the concentrates pile.
Also, typically there are four piles ... one is the stuff you are after, very dense. The next one is stuff not as dense, but possibly has value, might need a little more processing. The third is "the rest of the metal". The last is glass fiber, plastic, resin, etc. It is easy to set the table to make the various cuts wherever you want them. I usually draw the line between the first two at copper ... Everything denser than copper goes into the first bin. Copper, and everything at or about that density, goes into the second. The third is mostly junk, alumin(i)um and the like. Note that I try to pull all the magnetics out as early as possible, for processing separately.
"The property I have in Nevada came with mineral rights, and a shit-ton of old mining equipment, including devices for separating metals from ore."
Would that be the radioactive part of Nevada?
You have checked all the "shit-ton" of old mining equipment with geiger counters and dosimeters to ensure it wasn't used as "bomb fodder" in one of the numerous nuclear weapons tests?
Do these "ores" include fissile material - only one previous (not so) careful owner?
I note you use 'forced to run 11'. Those holes that allow this are being closed, so it may not be an option for long, unless you think that Win11 without security updates is any safer than Win10 without security updates.
I have many systems knocking about, and personally own none that will take Windows 11 without using one of the workarounds, but that does not worry me at all, as I am running an estate made up of various Linux distro's and other non-Microsoft OS's.
One of my work provided laptop's could take Win11. The other can't (too early a CPU, otherwise meets the criteria), but the one that does is running Fedora as an officially sanctioned and supported OS by my workplace, and the other is not my immediate problem!
"None of my elderly cousins will try Linux"
Funny story about my Great Aunt ... I brought her a Slackware box after spending four weekends in a row cleaning up malware on her XP system. She refused to use Slack, because it was "too hard to make a change at my age". Several weeks later, I realized that I hadn't had any support calls from her. I called to see what was up. It turned out that her sister in Finland had sent her some pictures right about the time that the XP box crapped out again. Out of desperation, she booted up the Slack box ... and hasn't looked back.
Several months later, she asked me to "get rid of that old thing", pointing at the now working again XP box. I couldn't convince her that I could install the same version of Slackware on it, with it's more modern CPU, more RAM, larger harddrive, etc. To her, the OS+hardware were a lemon that couldn't be fixed. She became a Linux advocate in her "over 80" club ... but unfortunately, she called it "the version of windows that my nephew gave me".
The above events occurred around 20 years ago. Linux is a lot more mature and user friendly now.
"the version of windows that my nephew gave me".
LOL, that doesn't surprise me in the least. Just look at the number people who talk about an "iPhone" or "iPad" when Apple were no where near the design or sale of the device from China :-) Or any other item that is commonly referred to by a known brand name. There's a name for that which escapes me at the moment.
I mentor at one of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Code Clubs. DONATE YOUR SURPLUS LAPTOPS to us, to help us teach kids to program.
We blat over all the previous owners stuff with a Linux, and then use the machine to run Scratch, drive Raspberry Pis, and BBC Micro:bits, and Crumble robots...
And a good time is had by all.
"one of the top guys in the IT department" should be more than capable of wiping drives, or delegating to a "not top" guy which takes next to no time out of their busy day and makes the upper management happier that the data is being wiped *before* it leave the premises (and saves them having to pay[*] to dispose of it through WEEE certified disposal companies.
Dropping some extra work onto IT isn't a cost, those guys are already being paid anyway :-)
I have a stash of Dell laptops that have been deemed surplus as they're either 5 years old or won't run Windows 11.
What am I doing?
Anyone here that needs one gets one, with the money they would spend going to a charity of their choice. Pay the kindness forward. The rest of the laptops that aren't needed, the ones that are battered are stripped of batteries and other things so they're essentially dummy machines. They're going to a special needs school for the kids to use as roleplay toys in their education, and even then the ones that are too good for that will have Windows 11 thrust upon them and the students will use them.
As for the business I'm working for, we're making sure Windows 11 is the last Windows we use. We're not going for this bullshit again.
So, Micro$oft: the kids would like to say thank you with a fuck you.
You are a good person. The company I used to work for would raffle old laptops off to employees (minus the HDDs). Until they got acquired, then it was deemed unacceptable (sometimes I think the management does this because they can't stand the employees getting anything for free). This is the way it should work -- pass them on to someone who can use them. Ideally a school, for kids who can't afford a computer, or some other worthy cause.
There's a charity called Business2schools that connects companies who have unwanted computers and office equipment to schools that can make use of them...
...I'm not a Linux person by default, my main laptop is still Windows 10*, but I just converted a 2012 Mac Mini to Mint and its perfect for my needs. Swapped the 4gb for 16gb for £30 (most Kingston memory on eBay is clearly fake as it looks completely different to the genuine item) and swapped the 1tb HDD with a 512gb SSD I had laying around as a backup, with the old 1tb drive becoming the new backup disk.
* Still have Windows 10 to run Affinity, but something suspicious is going on with them at the moment, so that may soon change.
You might already know about this IGO, but there's a kit that allows you to fit a second drive inside a 2012 Mac mini (I used one of these in my old quad-core i7)...
Does that £1.6B include the costs of extraction or just the esimated final value of the recovered material?
Because spending £10B to recover £1.6B of material doesn't seem like very business savvy maths
If scrap IT equipment is so valuable why have businesses been paying for decades to get it taken away, surely the recyclers would be queuing up to pay me for my electronic waste?
As other have said, making the machines viable via Linux etc seems to be the best option economically and environmentally.
"As other have said, making the machines viable via Linux etc seems to be the best option economically and environmentally."
Of course. The mantra is Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. Most people, especially Govt., seem to pay lip service to the first, ignore the second and trumpet the 3rd and last option, the least "green" of the three. In most situations, you can't really reduce how much IT kist you have, but there are many ways to re-use it, possibly some internally but mostly externally either by donation or staff "raffles" as others have mentioned above. Schools are often the worst places to approach[*] because often they don't know any better and think the curriculum requires them to have the "latest" technology running Windows because that's the target of most educational software and what the outside world expects. Although it's rather sad the number of staff I deal with who went through school "learning" Windows still have only barest idea of how to use it, not knowing some of the simplest things.
* some exceptions of course.
>>Schools are often the worst places to approach
I dunno - our LA has a (minimum)5 year replacement policy on classroom hardware and 7 years for servers. They also operate a sustainability swindle (actually not bad value) where we buy gear, with a 5Y RTB warranty, at a decent price, then pay 20% (out of our annual capitation budget) for 5 years so we have the cash available to replace it when it fails/is required. There is no "must have the latest and greatest" driver.
Much of Wales, hence many (but not all) schools, operates along similar lines.
I don't think the same thing happens in England though - it certainly used to be that the school would buy a load of the latest and greatest then, 7-10 years later, realise that it was all falling to bits and have to rush around to try to find the substantial sums of money required to update their gear...
>> Although it's rather sad the number of staff I deal with who went through school "learning" Windows
There is no "learning Windows" done in schools - it's not on the curriculum.
Anything pupils learn aboout Windows (or indeed common office packages) is by osmosis rather than training.
The number of people who use <caps lock> to get a single capital letter is way too high as is the number who use Excel as a database or Word as a spreadsheet and don't get me started on document templates/tables/layout/fonts etc.
/nurse - Dried Frog Pills STAT!
And you'd be amazed by how many people, middle aged and sometimes younger as well as older- don't have basic IT skills. Excel as a database? You'd be lucky- I frequently meet people who can barely fire up a PC- something they tell me after I've mentioned that my volunteer job is teaching Digital Inclusion.
I get a lot of "I could do with some of that"s
The SSD containing Windows 10 on my 2009 Dell Optiplex died last week so i popped in a SATA hard drive i had lying around and decided to install MXlinux as I had heard it was good for older PCs. I was blown away on how responsive it is, It now boots from spinning disk to MXlinux about as quick as it used to boot Windows 10 from an SSD.
I'm not sure intoxicate is the word you are looking for. But yes, watching young kids loading up barrels as mini incinerators burning copper wire to remove the insulation, breathing in all those toxic fumes really is the dark side of recycling. Not to mention some of those 3rd world ship scrapping operations which can be far far worse for those doing the jobs.
14.4 million devices... 1.6 billion quids-worth of gold. Hold on. 1.6E9 ÷ 14.4E6 = £111.11 per device. That sounds like a lot.
Today's gold price is £97,268.23 kg-1, in anticipation of the AI bubble burst. To look at it in the other direction, £1.6 billion buys you 3,783 metric tonnes of gold.
A quarter kilo of gold per ton?? Maybe if you considered a ton of bare CPUs removed from sockets, but there's no way that's true for a ton of laptops. A quarter kilo of gold is $16K, or $16 of gold per pound. If that was at all true I would expect them to pay me a few bucks for a 5 lb laptop that contained $80 in gold alone!
The e-cyclers have incentive to encourage people to recycle because people give them stuff for free (in some places you have to pay them to take it!) then they make money off that stuff with zero acquisition cost via selling it to someone in Asia who does the messy business of actually extracting the gold and other materials. Yes yes I know operating a business, handling materials etc. isn't free so I'm not saying they aren't doing a valuable service but they are motivated to want people to recycle a working PC rather than reusing it.
With my little setup, I'm seeing between 100 and 200 grams of gold per ton of miscellaneous scrapped printed circuit boards, according to both my X-ray fluorescence analyzer and official assay. This can take a couple weeks for one guy working part time to process (automation would reduce this by more than half). That's between $12,700 and $25,400 every two weeks at today's prices. The electricity costs are under $1,000, and fuel for the smelter is about $250 (if I try to do the smelting myself). It is more than enough to make a living from ... IF you have the facilities, the equipment, and the permits. The facilities are your problem (it's a noisy, dirty operation, ideally suited for a disused mine site in the middle of nowhere). The equipment can be hand-built, or purchased used, if you don't have the money for new kit. The permits seem to be fairly easy to get and relatively inexpensive. (It's supposedly a GREEN INDUSTRY! The mind absolutely boggles ... )
If you get slaves to recover the metals in some shithole country, maybe. Otherwise it's going in the landfill like the rest of the junk generated by planned obsolescense.
Better to sell the used devices to people who don't care about Microsoft's dictates. Most of them from that time period probably would work well with a Linux system installed.
There used to be a principle "Polluter pays". Perhaps any vendor who deliberately turns a device to potential landfill by making it obsolete or, even worse, bricks it by turning off a server that supports it remotely, should be required to (a) compensate the owner for residual value which it would have had were it not abandoned and (b) recycling costs.
> Win 10 machines until they cease to work or Hell freezes over
It will be a toss up between the machine failing electronically or mechanically, Applications no longer being supported and the version you need will <just> have to have windows 11 or 12, or $MSoft doing something to brick the machine (which would not surprise me!).
Then Hell can freeze over.
I finally retired my dinky little "net-top" (remember them?) when Mint stopped being 32 bits.
My boy had worn out the flash-drive (remember them?) with the "Linspire" distro it came with.
Since I vetoed winders in the house, he got a swanky Apple laptop
(with a crappy screen) which probably saved him some grief at his posh school.
Upgraded (now mine) the flash-drive it came with to compact flash (remember that?)
and maxed out the memory to 1G5! Ran for another ~10 years on Mint XFCE 32.
The horrible Apple thing needed the treatment after about 4 years,
so I inherited that too and he moved on to more Apple landfill.
Old one got new battery and maxed out memory (when you could still do that).
Replace RAM, not just add of course.
No SSD then, so upgrade ONLY cost about same as little blue job cost new.
Still crappy screen and whole thing just died after outliving 3 Apple chargers.
Typing this on a CEX Lenovo special. Special because it runs Mint XFCE 64.
The net-top is replaced by (what else) a 64 bit net-top. It does now have an SSD
but only 2G9 out of the 4G RAM accessible. Luckily that's plenty for Linux.
ACER Aspire rules.
