Wide Format news 1-2017

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USA recycling of e-waste gaining traction Recycling, recovery and de-manufacturing wide-format and other large office machines is up to each individual state to legislate in the USA. Unlike other countries, such as the European Union with its WEEE legislation, there is no unified push. The USA has 25 states that have passed legislation mandating e-waste recycling requirements, with several more states either improving laws relating to e-waste or passing new ones. Most legislations use a “producer responsibility” approach that mandates manufacturers pay for recycling. It causes manufacturers of hardware to scrutinise strategy for managing returns. But while legislation is inching along, there are options for people who wish to recover steel, boards or precious metals from machines in the USA. Wide-format machines, though, are notoriously hardier than desktop counterparts. Recovery and refurbishing is often the option, even for machines brought into e-waste facilities. At Forever Green Recycling, based in Chantilly, Virginia, the first option is to sell the machines. “We’ve been fortunate,” said Duke Scott, who has run the facility 30 miles west of Washington, D.C., with his brother for nine years. “We’ve been able to resell most of the ones we get”. If it can’t be resold, they strip out the parts, as “a lot of people will re-use the parts.” Precious metals are saved and sent to a smelter. Panels are crushed and made into steel beams. “I had one guy tell me to think of it as urban mining,” Scott added. Urban mining grows up The fledgling sorting programmes that marked the ’90s have been replaced with behemoth shredders that can shred refrigerators, and sorting into commodities on a grand scale. Precious metals are not found to a large degree, but the recovery of precious metals is significantly helpful to the environment, too. For instance, for the traditional mining and production operation for 2.2 pounds of gold (one kilogramme), it takes 182,543 gallons (691,000 litres) of water and 310 pounds (141 kilogrammes) of cyanide. Mining one gold ball the size of a golf ball, you’d move over nine tonnes (8,165 kilogrammes) of dirt, costing approximately $919 (€817) per ounce using traditional mining methods. But precious metals in modern machines are scarce, says Dave Beal, Vice President of EPC, Inc., based in St. Charles, Missouri. “Most of the places that we used to get it from were servers and systems, but even now, you don’t really recover that much of it.” EPC is one of the largest resellers of used IT gear in the Midwest United States, in addition to being a major asset recovery solution provider in the USA. Since 1998, EPC has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of CSI Leasing, one of the largest independent IT leasing specialists in the world, with operations in North, Central and South America, and throughout Europe. “We actually refurbish more equipment than we recycle,” Beal noted. “It’s just because most of the stuff that we get is newer stuff and so it still has a value in the market, and so that’s where we go with it. Honestly, a lot of the wide-format printers, the plotters and that sort of stuff doesn’t lose its value as much as a system does. For the most part, those don’t evolve as fast as a system.” Printers retain value longer than systems and servers. According to the University of Washington, Seattle, electronic waste (e-waste) like this accounts for over 40 million metric tons (tonnes) of waste around the world annually, and is responsible for 70 percent of heavy metals that end up in landfills (University of Washington) ©2017 The Recycler www.therecycler.com Page 6
The process Beal says with large computer towers now the size of a notebook, everything is smaller. “Everything has gone down in scale,” Beal said. “I’ve been demanufacturing and reclaiming 3.2 million pounds the last few years, but have actually done more units. It’s just that everything is getting smaller. There’s more stuff out there and it’s getting smaller, so you don’t get an increase of weight.” “If it’s a small printer, like a desktop, you remove the toner and the paper and it all is recoverable. When you throw it into a shredder, you’re going to end up with plastic; you’re going to end up with steel, which is, by far, what you have most prevalent in a printer. Then you’re going to have a little bit of a circuit board and a little bit of aluminium.” Metal panels and circuit boards are the most valuable items in printers, Beal stated. Shredder-sorter systems, like the one being installed by EPC, take a large machine, and it grinds and shreds it. “On the other side, a magnet comes first and it will pull the steel out. Then there are what they call Eddy currents. and those will remove the aluminium and copper (an Eddy current separator uses a powerful magnetic field to separate non-ferrous metals from waste). After all ferrous metals have been removed previously by some arrangement of magnets, and then as they go down the line, the stuff that’s left over, like the plastic, there are little air jets that will blow those off into their own area. “It sorts off the materials – it will do that with the circuit boards. It will throw that off to a line. It uses an optical sorter, so it can figure out the difference between a circuit board and a piece of plastic.” Beal has been in the reclamation business for 12 years now, he said, and saw his first shredding-sorting system about 10 years ago, which has improved. “It can sort out more different things than it used to,” Beal added. “Cleaner streams, I guess is what commodities are.” The two standards There are two standards for e-waste in the USA – e-Steward and the more modern standard, R2. These are based on the ISO 140001 environmental management system standard. Currently all seven EPC processing centres in the USA are certified to e-Steward standards. That means no exporting out of the USA. There are 26 states with e-waste legislation, and Beal is involved in pushing the legislation e-waste recyclers are pushing in Missouri, but it will be considered in the next legislative session, at the earliest, going through the Solid Waste Advisory Board as a prefiled bill this November. There are flaws with the current method of handling e-waste. For example, takeback legislation is such that if an OEM sold 100,000 pounds (45,360 kilogrammes) into that state in a given year, then the company is required to recover or recycle 60 percent of that. “All the manufacturers, and in most cases, the state didn’t care whose you recycled, just as long as you recycled 60,000 pounds of electronics,” Beal said. “What happens is these manufacturers go after this and when they get to their quota, they don’t pay for anything else. So they may get their quota the first four months of the year, then the next of the year, they’re not funding it at all. Then these CRTs and printers and all that are still coming in to recyclers, and for the most part, the recyclers will not take a CRT after that.” So recyclers often will stockpile CRTs until the next cycle begins (see sidebar on CRTs on page 8), as Beal says no money can be made recycling CRTs unless the OEM or someone is paying for it. Federal e-waste legislation needed Beal and many other recyclers on the state level point out the need for e-waste legislation on the nationwide level, but as he says, it is not a priority now for a USA Congress that has “bigger fish to fry”. The main federal law governing solid waste is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, dealing mostly with CRTs. Steps have been taken to not stockpile e-waste in third-world countries, and there is more sophistication in the legislation being considered among states, but only a fraction of e-waste is processed. There are many arguments for enhancing the processing of electronic equipment through e-waste centres. One is the tremendous amount of electronic equipment that is out there, and recovery of plastic items that would last centuries in a landfill. Another is the potential resources – from precious metals to metals like steel, copper and aluminium – that would not have to be mined. And responsible e-waste recycling has long-term benefits for keeping contaminants out of the environment. More federal legislation is needed to make the current patchwork of regulations among states universal. ©2017 The Recycler www.therecycler.com Page 7
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Wide Format news 1-2017

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