the kind of recycling I'm describing could be be described as "cherry picking".
A computer, headed to the smelter. One removes the hard drives. are they useful? Perhaps. 80 gig or greater can find a very useful life.. a cheap adapter, and one now has an 80, 120, or more gig flash drive..
The hard drives that are *really* junk. i.e. don't work. They have at least two very strong neodymium magnets. Remove them, before submitting the aluminum case to the smelter. Surely, one can find a few practical uses for a pair of super magnets.. even if all they do, is hold some doors open at the appropriate time. That's what one professional group uses these for. That I know of. But there are more applications. What about with the little bit of copper wire from said computer, recycled.. as a generator. Doesn't require much hardware to make such a thing..
see.. the recyclers might welcome something like this. A couple of aluminum hard drive cases, submitted to the smelter, without copper, ceramics.. I mean, by the time I'm done with it, all you have to recycle is aluminum. Far easier than separating copper, aluminum, etc. etc.. in the smelter.
I'm sure somebody else has thought of this.
Old old televisions. Or monitors.
They have either a very long length of copper wire, or aluminum wire, in a degaussing coil.
I have harvested these coils from these. I strung the wire out, along a very long city block here, and braided the strands into the finest stranded twisted wire you could imagine. About sixteen strands, wound up with a cheap drill..
I dunno.