"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
Is a lead-free item that fails and ends up in the landfill
after 2 years better than a lead-containing device that
lasts a decade?

And is then properly recycled?

Recycling is the issue. The only current economical way to do it is to
ship
the equipment to third-world countries where poverty-stricken can
dismantle
it.



In days gone by, prisoners in the UK sewed mailbags. It seems to me that
there is a vast untapped pool of labour there now, languishing at my
expense, in the jails. So why not set up electronic recycling plants in the
prisons? That way, you get the job done in a properly supervised manner, and
the cost of labour is not an issue. Ever. Bish bash bosh, the jobs a good
'un, as they say ...

Just as a matter of interest, I saw a documentary on TV a while back, where
a UK company is recycling computer hardware for the gold that's used to
plate connectors and so on. In order to get at the gold loaded components,
it is necessary for them to dismantle and effectively recycle virtually the
whole machine. Even given the fact that they have to do this, which is a
useful side effect of the process, and the fact that they then have to put
the stuff through assorted chemical processes to recover the pure gold, they
are still recovering enough to be covering their costs plus making a very
large profit on the whole operation.

So if a few politicians pulled their fingers out of their arses, and started
thinking outside the box on how to manage the pollution as William suggests,
instead of trying to stop it with inane directives such as RoHS, we wouldn't
need to have so much eco******** thrust at us.

Arfa