Wide Format news 1-2017

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.
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