#Industry ·2025-12-13
At 4 a.m., the last street lamp in the city went out, and I followed a van into the factory area in the suburbs. The door opened, and a faint smell of pine resin wafted in—the distinctive odor of dismantled waste circuit boards. The conveyor belt slowly started up, and the first mobile phone motherboard covered with solder points was fed into the inlet, like a veteran soldier being stripped of his shoulder badge, awaiting a final review. The metal blade descended, first crushing and then screening. The plastic casing turned into particles the size of rice grains, blown by a wind-separator machine to the blue ton bags on the left; the copper foil and gold-plated circuits continued forward, like gold sand left behind by gold miners in a sieve. The magnetic separator drum ejected iron screws with a crisp "tapping" sound, and the electrostatic sorter separated aluminum and copper with 20,000 volts of high voltage, like a silent judgment. I crouched down and picked up a copper particle that had just been separated. It was only the size of a mung bean, but it glinted with the luster of a fresh coin under the light. Operator Lao Li said that one ton of waste boards could yield 300 kilograms of copper, 10 kilograms of silver, and less than 200 grams of gold. Those trace precious metals hidden in the chip pins were once the lifeblood of the electronic age, but now they are accurately "extracted" by equipment and reinjected into the economic arteries. However, the value of the equipment goes beyond money. Next to the tailings warehouse, a pyrolysis furnace was decomposing brominated flame retardants in a low-temperature oxygen-free environment, locking potential dioxins into carbon black. The exhaust gas was washed twice with activated carbon and alkali solution, and no pungent odor could be detected at the discharge point. Lao Li patted the guardrail: "Ten years ago, we used acid washing, and not even grass could grow by the riverbank; now, koi have been raised near the factory." At noon, a new energy truck entered the finished product area, loading the shiny copper bricks. They would go to the copper foil factory and once again become the internal veins of mobile phones, computers, and even wind power coils. I watched the departing taillights and suddenly realized: circuit board recycling equipment is not cold steel, but alchemists of urban mines, allowing dormant circuits to complete an apology and compensation to the Earth before electricity flows through them again. As night fell again, the factory area lights lit up, like a new circuit diagram. The machines continued to operate, with countless microscopic regeneration stories hidden in the rumbling noise—copper particles, gold powder, and resin particles, which were lining up, waiting to be connected by solder paste again, waiting for the next burst of electricity to awaken themselves and make us rethink the concept of "use and throw away".
2025-12-13
2025-12-13
2025-12-13
2025-12-13
2025-12-13
2025-12-13
No. 15 Industrial Avenue, Industrial Park, Shicheng County, Jiangxi Province
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