The nuanced answer to this is they have a first mover advantage and make a great robot. The point of the thread is that new development is much cheaper for folks to figure it out. Recyclers are the most entrepreneurial people you will ever meet. we’ll figure out some good uses for this stuff when it gets cheaper.
Most folks when they think of recycling, think of the blue bin they put out every week.
That’s about 25% by weight of all that gets recycled in the country.
Metals, industrial scrap, and other sources are 75% of what gets recycled in the US.
We are blue collar businesses, with high labor costs. Many are exploring robotics actively for repetitive tasks. We have some robots in our process, looking for more when the ROI makes sense.
It may not be 100x, but there will be value in robots in recycling.
Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because they cheapened out the expensive elements.
I would have to see the exact complaint. One interesting piece is that cameras are sold in the US by Nikon USA, and in the EU by Nikon Europe. It is possible that some regulations like Weee compliance, or maybe right to repair (manuals maybe?) that this older model does not comply with all of the EU law. Still ridiculous, but a possible different angle they are approaching it from.
E scrap contains a high proportion of potentially hazardous metals and materials which is why it has an outsized influence over just the volume. It is the fastest growing waste segment, and a large contributor of Heavy Metals.