Salvage is hard because nothing was built to be salvaged. Change how devices are made and how retired ones are collected, so reuse becomes the default instead of a project.
The policy moonshot is a standard pop-out compute module, a USB-C for second lives, required in cars, phones, and appliances. When a car is scrapped, its brain slides straight into a rack slot with a known interface, with no desoldering and no custom drivers. Billions of devices have already been built without that standard. For those, robotic disassembly lines use vision AI to pull working chips and memory off dead boards, mining e-waste for usable silicon instead of gold. An AI then designs a custom carrier board for whatever mix of parts came off the line that week. To collect the hardware, neighborhood compute co-ops work like libraries or credit unions: residents drop off old devices, the local hub runs workloads, members earn credits, and the waste heat warms the building.