October
6, 2005
Recycling e-waste
At Intercon Solutions, a company that
specializes in recycling computers and other electronic
products, workers disassemble a CPU tower in a minute
or two, a hard disk drive in another couple of minutes,
and a monitor in another minute or so. "We literally
take everything apart by hand," says Timothy Osgood,
director of corporate recycling. The process eventually
recovers steel from computer casings, aluminum from
the platters in disk drives, and copper and other metals
from circuit boards. The metals go to a refinery for
recovery. Plastics, if pure enough, get processed and
recycled. Otherwise, they're burned under controlled
conditions for energy recovery.
Intercon is different from most electronics
recycling companies in that it concentrates exclusively
on recovering raw materials. It doesn't strip and resell
components, and it doesn't send any e-waste to landfills
or overseas. Nor does Intercon shred any e-waste, a
common practice that makes material easier and less
expensive to transport, but at the same time makes it
more difficult to recycle.
For many companies, though, component
resale and exporting are big parts of the business.
Resale and exporting help make recycling less expensive,
they say, and exported items such as used monitors and
disk drives enable the production of affordable computers
for populations that otherwise would have to do without.
Critics counter, however, that exporting e-waste merely
shifts environmental problems from industrialized nations
to less developed ones, particularly in Asia. They site
numerous reports claiming that e-waste containing hazardous
substances has created dreadful environmental hot spots.
"It's time and money," says Intercon's
Osgood. Labor costs are much lower overseas, he says,
but "you don't have OSHA, you don't have EPA." And,
he notes, a lot of exported e-waste contains no reusable
components, but is merely a shredded mix of materials.
"There are processes and shredders that separate out
ferrous and nonferrous metals and plastics," he says,
"but about 30% ends up as a mish-mash that's made up
of everything else. There's really nobody in the United
States that can profitably recover any of the materials
that are in the mish-mash, so that 30% ends up going
overseas."
Traditionally, shredding has been the
easiest and least expensive way to deal with e-waste,
even though it greatly reduces the materials that can
be recovered, not to mention the components that can
be saved and reused. The practices of designing for
disassembly and designing for recycling aim to change
that, however. Designing for disassembly makes electronic
products easier, faster, and thus less expensive to
take apart. Designing for recycling helps ensure that
the materials in electronic products are compatible
with recycling processes and are thus recoverable.
Gary Legg
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