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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Computer recycling