1996 Electronics Industry Environmental Roadmap - Civil and ...

Disposition
evaluating new technologies, assessing collection and product management approaches, and
supporting research in materials characterization and processing. This prototype facility could be
consortially managed, providing a neutral test-bed for manufacturers, suppliers, and recyclers to
collaborate and experiment. Such a facility would be ideally established through a public/private
cooperative project, providing government cost sharing to increase the leverage of pooled
industrial support.
5.6.2 Technology Development
Ultimately, the economic viability of effective product end-of-life management will depend upon
the availability of techniques and technologies that can efficiently optimize the value recovered
end-of-life products. This technology development should be undertaken in a way that leverages
the resources of manufacturers and suppliers, preferably with some matching support from
federal, state, or local government. This matching support will likely be critical until such time
as the technology can accommodate larger volumes of product and feed stock and economies of
scale allow unsubsidized operation.
Plastics: Plastics recycling represents a significant opportunity for retrieving material value that
is unrealized due to immature technology. The state of resin identification technology renders
plastics separation difficult, and sometimes impossible, for many plastic parts coming from durable-good
streams, including computer and electronic equipment. To a large degree, for this reason
less than 2% of the more than 2 billion pounds of plastics used each year to manufacture
computer and electronic equipment is recovered at the end of the product’s useful life [29]. This
is particularly frustrating for the goal of recovering value, given that plastics are the most
valuable material in a typical desktop computer system after metals (see table in Appendix I for
specific values). The challenge in recycling plastics from computer systems includes:
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The plastics used in computer equipment are more specialized than those used in packaging.
Whereas the majority of plastic packaging is categorized in six grades of plastic
resin, more than a dozen families of plastic and hundreds of grades might be required to
comprise a similar fraction of the durables market. This broad variety of materials
increases the complexity of separation.
Many parts contain a wide variety of reinforcements, fillers, and pigments. Changing
filler content and foaming causes material density to vary, even within the same type of
plastic.
Computer parts often contain high levels of metal contamination, including wiring, brackets,
structural pieces, and molded-in screw inserts.
Paint and metallic coatings on some parts make identification, sorting, and melt
reprocessing much more difficult.
Larger and more variable-thickness wall sections increases the challenges associated with
size reduction and particle-size and shape control.
Separation: In spite of the volume and potential recoverable value of plastics used in computer
systems, a jump start may be needed to build the capabilities and infrastructure needed to develop
an economically viable industry. This is particularly true when attempting to recover value more
broadly from electronic products other than computers. Given the advantages to both industry