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August 2007

Chicago Tribune

What´s my Line?

Who are some of your customers?
Union Pacific, City of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, Ericsson Wireless, Chicago Sun-Times. We also have individual consumers as customers.

And you help them with computers?
Anything that is computer-related, from printer to a mouse key-board, CPU (central processing unit), monitor, modem, main-frames. Also, microwaves, stereos, servers, radio communications equipment, antennas receivers, cable receivers, cell phones.

How much of this gear do you deal with?
As a minimum, we process 10 tractor trailers in a week. And a tractor trailer has about 30,000 pounds. That comes to 300,000 pounds a week.

What do you do when it comes in?
We unload the loads that come in shrink-wrapped pallets. Everything is mixed together. Then we separate items, count them and weigh them.

If you didn´t get this material, what would happen to it?
A good 80 percent would all end up in a landfill if it wasn´t for us. We handle everything, and don´t create any waste in the process.

How do you prevent it from ending up in the landfill?
We demanufacture it. We take apart the CPUs and cell phones and modems to get at the raw material.

How long does it take you to disassemble a computer CPU?
Twenty-five seconds.

How about a cell phone?
Thirty seconds. It takes longer than a CPU. There´s a lot of little screws in cell phones and they´re in layers within miniscrews holding all the components together on the inside.

What materials do you reclaim?
Steel, gold, aluminum, copper, plastic.

Is any of this material hazardous?
Almost every printed circuit board has a battery or mercury switch of some sort. But we´re just handling metals. We´re not cutting lead or shredding lead. We´re not doing anything that generates a lead dust.

When consumers dispose of their computers, is there anything they should be concerned about?
Hackers can take hard drives, even ones that have been erased, and still take information from them. We take drives to a machine to crush them or take it apart so there is no way to retrieve any data off them. We do drive processing for the Department of Energy. They don´t want their old hard drives ending up on eBay.

What do you change consumers to destroy a hard drive?
Five bucks.

Every Wednesday, the Sun-Times Business Section features a mystery occupation. See if you can guess the job before the end of the interview.
A 25-year veteran of the recycling industry, Kenneth Burnett heads up demanufacturing operations for Intercon Solutions, a Chicago Heights-based secure, zero landfill tolerance recycling facility.

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