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World's Manufacturing Ecosystem
http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html
We started in the section of the market where people were taking broken or trashed cellphones and stripping them down for all of the parts. Any phone part that conceivably retained functionality was stripped off and packaged for sale in big plastic bags. Another source of components seemed to be rejected parts from the factory lines that were then repaired, or sheets of PCBs in which only one of the components had failed a test. iPhone home buttons, wifi chipsets, Samsung screens, Nokia motherboards, everything. bunnie pointed to a bag of chips that he said would have a street value of $50,000 in the US selling for about $500. These chips were sold, not individually, but by the pound. Who buys chips by the pound? Small factories that make all of the cellphones that we all buy "new" will often be short on parts and they will run to the market to buy bags of that part so that they can keep the line running. It's very likely that the "new" phone that you just bought from ATT has "recycled" Shenzhen parts somewhere inside.
The other consumer of these parts are the people who repair phones. Phone repair starts with simple stuff like replacing the screen to full-on rebuilds. You can even buy whole phones built from scrap parts -- "I lost my phone, can you repair it for me?"
After this market where phones were "recycled" we saw equivalent markets for laptops, TVs, everything.
