Garbage Mountains

Yes, that’s it. I used to bike up to the top where a picture frame has been set up. You can put Taipei 101 in the frame for an instagram pic. Hard to imagine the small mountain is made up of garbage.

Also have factories dumping toxic waste in the mountainous areas too.

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Unbelievable. They could at least have neutralized it first - the end result would have been reasonably harmless, not to mention safer to transport. How do people even get hold of conc. nitric acid so easily? And I wonder where they were dumping the leftover electronic waste?

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I bought those before. They just ask for your ID and writes down the details, but no one stops you from buying them, and they really only show it to anyone if authorities come looking. You know in case someone is going around making petn or some other explosive.

All the standard lab acids, 98% sulfuric, 68% nitric, and 32% hydrochloric are all sold over the counter here.

I tried my hand at it, yes it’s noxious as hell, releases gasses that’s not good to breathe and causes everything to rust. Bigger problem is acquiring those wastes to be worth it. If you paid for them, it’s not worth it. But I only tried it with a couple of boards I got on hand, that was bad enough. I can’t imagine getting 7 million worth of gold off it. Must have been many tons of circuit boards.

I think I would make more money taking the wastes, clipping off the gold contacts and selling them on ebay for another sucker to try their hand at this.

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Not really a smart thing to be doing at home without the correct precautions tbh.

Whatever reluctance you have to working, I’m sure you can find more productive activities than trying to recover small amounts of precious metals from electronic waste…

I presume the waste you generated just went down the sink? Like you said, not really convenient to pay for proper disposal.

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Really you ordered and used these products at home? Lucky you didn’t injure yourself severely or worse.

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No, it sat around, and probably threw it in the garbage eventually.

Much easier and safer to cut the boards up by mechanical means and sell the gold bit on ebay, let someone else try it.

image

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That’s the only legal way I know of.

I would say much easier and safer to work toward income streams that don’t rely on mirroring the lifestyle of someone living on an e-waste scrapyard in Ghana.

I’m not sure whether that’s legal (it might well be), but it’s not really responsible either. I suspect they didn’t really design the household trash regulations assuming that people would be doing weird shit like this at home though.

Another article on Taipei Times about “trash waterfalls” and illegal dumping.

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Aside from that map showing almost no dumps. The smaller, illegal, buried etc etc ones are I the thousands everywhere. Possibly hundreds of thousands.

I went to get some river rocks for the kid, this was on the way. right at the top of a cliff above a river where tourists go to swim, take selfies etc. See these everywhere on the daily.

Pardon the shit picks. This is actually recycling. What stuck out to me was: rotting ridges in the bushes, loads of paint and chemical cans in bags (I spotted numerous paints, solvents like naphtha etc) then the usual trash we jsut sort of shrug off in Taiwan. Plastic, metal sheets/bars, toilets etc. It’s the chemical stuff being left above water sources and catchment which is the obvious issue. Well, the bigger issue.



Not mountains, but toxic as fuck directly leeching into our waterways.

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So is that how the government is throwing trash away, just dump it in the mountains?

Are there not incinerators? Are there not enough of them? I mean we could just throw it into the coal furnace to fuel TSMC rather than polluting the mountains?

Buried in soil, dumped down mountains, dumped in ocean, burned near cities. I have a hard time finding a positive in regards to taiwans waste problem, outside most places have newrly free and nearly daily to your door recycle, gsrbage and sometimes composting services. Especially disgustin is the addiction to disposable everything and just buying new trash to throw it away not far down the road. It’s not healthy, nor sustainable.

It’s disgusting. Both literally and figuratively.

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Correct, some counties have no incinerators or not enough of them such as Hsinchu county

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A direct link to this thread.

Run your island as you wish, and good luck. People in my position have dozens of choices. Thank you kindly for the warning!

I always had an impression that Taiwan is in the top as for waste recycling…

https://www.tomra.com/en/news-and-media/news/2024/austria-wales-and-taiwan-leading-the-world-when-it-comes-to-rates-of-recycling


A year or so back the garbage was from Vietnam.
All thus stuff was Taiwanese, half the bottles were super supau all traditional characters.

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I’m betting a lot of these do not come from Taiwan.