The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.

The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.

> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.

> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.

I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.