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By Doug Bartholomew
The road to responsible, economical, and effective disposal of electronics waste in North America has been long and difficult—littered with unsafe conditions for workers, despoiling of the earth and air, and even a deadly explosion- and there's still a long way to go.
For CIOs looking for the latest ways to dispose of hundreds, or even thousands of old personal computers in North America—thereby avoiding having the old machines shipped to China where they are unsafely clawed to pieces by unsupervised laborers—there are some alternatives:
- sending old PCs to an accredited recycler for largely automated dismantling and component reuse.
- sending them to a fledgling e-waste-to-energy incinerator.
- turning them over to UNICOR, the Federal Prisons Recycling project, utilizing manual prison labor to break down machines for materials recovery.
Perhaps one of the most promising and innovative electronics waste facilities is run by the Globally Green Energy Consortium. With some 4,000 member companies, organizations, universities, and municipalities worldwide, GGEC operates an e-waste-to-energy plant near Mexico City that processes 500 tons of materials per week, producing up to 1.3 megawatts of electricity.
Electronics components are placed on a conveyor and sent into a high-pressure compartment, where they are subjected to lasers, which convert the materials to a gas. The gas is then forced into another high-pressure compartment, where it is used to drive a power turbine. "The process is similar to the combustion engine in a car," says Zacharie Mondel, CEO at GGEC in Naples, Fla.
"The technology is similar to plasma gasification," Mondel says. He adds that such a plant costs anywhere from about $18 million at the low end, and may run up to about $130 million, depending on the size and capacity of the facility. GGEC has plans to build similar plants in Santa Cruz, Calif., and in South Africa, India, and Indonesia, Mondel adds.
That technology may sound a bit Buck Rogers-like, but others in the electronics recycling industry claim it can work. "That technology is viable," says Mike Magliaro, a founder and partner at Maser Corp., a downstream market for e-recyclers.
Maser takes entire PCs and runs them through its mechanical system that breaks them down into commodities such as steel, aluminum, copper and plastic. "You have to have a lot of volume to pay for a system like ours," says Lauren Roman, a principal at Maser, which operates a plant in Barrie, Ontario, north of Toronto, Canada.
Another innovative recycler utilizing state-of-the-art automation is Creative Recycling Systems Inc. The company's system processes up to 24,000 pounds of materials per hour-the equivalent of 800 computer monitors. The system is highly automated, utilizing shredders and separators. Material is pulverized in an enclosure under negative air pressure.
Next: eWaste Disposal Can Lead to Difficult Choices
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