I’ve worked in tech basically all my life. Everything from IT to shuffling wafer around a fab to now working for an aerospace parts supplier as an electrical tech.
The amount of waste is… it’s shocking. A board fails, and half of these companies throw it away. The other half sends it off to be ‘recycled’ as if that’s any better in the long run. Just because one chip is bad or whatever doesn’t mean the rest of the components on the board are bad.
That being said, I understand the massive amount of labor it would take to desolder every component on a board just to add them to stock. That’s why nobody does it. You’d need an army of people to properly remove and test every component on a failed board.
But, like, you don’t have to? All those components are already in a spot where they won’t get lost and can be retrieved when needed: on the failed board. Thankfully the company I work for now understands that buying things to be shipped takes a lot more time than just… taking an hour to steal a chip from a failed board and using that.
I worked for a company before that had at least half of the boards come off the wave solder machines with problems. Excess solder in places it shouldn’t be, failed components everywhere, and basic assembly issues. They’d toss these boards in a corner of the building to be repaired later. The issue is that they just couldn’t quit taking people away from rework and putting them on assembly. The engineers never bothered to come downstairs and actually do their jobs. So the failed boards never got worked on, and they kept generating a mountain of them.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad people are actually fixing stuff instead of throwing it away. Were that this would become the norm.
It’s really a good sign of the economic situation. If more people thought about waste before purchase and adopted a make do and mend attitude. That would help. But for a long time it’s been cheap to just replace and not care.
Good.
I’ve worked in tech basically all my life. Everything from IT to shuffling wafer around a fab to now working for an aerospace parts supplier as an electrical tech.
The amount of waste is… it’s shocking. A board fails, and half of these companies throw it away. The other half sends it off to be ‘recycled’ as if that’s any better in the long run. Just because one chip is bad or whatever doesn’t mean the rest of the components on the board are bad.
That being said, I understand the massive amount of labor it would take to desolder every component on a board just to add them to stock. That’s why nobody does it. You’d need an army of people to properly remove and test every component on a failed board.
But, like, you don’t have to? All those components are already in a spot where they won’t get lost and can be retrieved when needed: on the failed board. Thankfully the company I work for now understands that buying things to be shipped takes a lot more time than just… taking an hour to steal a chip from a failed board and using that.
I worked for a company before that had at least half of the boards come off the wave solder machines with problems. Excess solder in places it shouldn’t be, failed components everywhere, and basic assembly issues. They’d toss these boards in a corner of the building to be repaired later. The issue is that they just couldn’t quit taking people away from rework and putting them on assembly. The engineers never bothered to come downstairs and actually do their jobs. So the failed boards never got worked on, and they kept generating a mountain of them.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad people are actually fixing stuff instead of throwing it away. Were that this would become the norm.
It’s really a good sign of the economic situation. If more people thought about waste before purchase and adopted a make do and mend attitude. That would help. But for a long time it’s been cheap to just replace and not care.