So, we are starting with how one of the biggest recyclers in USA does the tedious work of recycling. As Electronic Waste continues to grow its dominion over our planet, some of us have found a way to fight it. One of those is Sims Lifecycles Services.
It is very hard to recycle electronics because they are not made to be
recycled. Talking about a device there can be hundreds of materials, ranging
from toxic materials to plastic and even gold. So, if everything goes right
there’s a lot of money to be made.
Only about 17% of the total electronic waste comes around to be recycled, recycling these takes a lot of precession, space, time, and heavy-duty machine. Our today’s choice company has a female dominance in the firm. Ingrid, president of SIMS LIFECYCLE SERVICES shared about her female-dominant machines, Sally, the shredder. Heidi, The German and Ginger, the metal finder.
They recycled about 6 million pounds of old
electronics, Ingrid showed us her biggest plant in La Vergne, Tennessee,
outside of Nashville. The mostly get recycling products from offices like
Computers, laptops or phones. She shared that the company even has
fortune 500 companies like HP and Lexmark, even insurance companies
and banks. The rest of the clients and secret.
Ingrid told the 4 R’s they have at the company:
Recycling is used as the very last resort. They actually use the First in First Out (FIFO) System for inventory management.
The SCALE: The inventory is first weighed and then tagged for being either reused or
recycled. They input all the data into their private database. Then these
are sent to their respective portions of the building, if the waste is meant
to reused, it is sent to reuse division of the factory and if not, it’s sent
the other way.
Reuse: Reusing means “to use again especially in a different way or after
reclaiming or reprocessing. Reclaiming or Reprocessing can be explained as
the valuable parts are extracted from the electronics and then they are
either sold or sent back to sender of electronics for a certain amount for
SIMS’s expenses.
Part Harvesting: Part Harvesting can be a dangerous extraction process because the
electronics as explained by the engineers have gotten smaller and by time
manufacturers’ have made products without considering there recycling.
Electronics even have dangerous metals and chemicals with that they even
have precious metals like Gold, Palladium and silver and some
non-precious metals too like Lead, Copper and Aluminum.
Considering that most portion of the electronic is meant to be reused the
most common ones are Hard Disks and having clients like Insurance and
Banking companies (they would not like that Data can be shared through
these). For this a separate part in the factory is made:
Data Wiping: This is done in a completely different place where the hard disks
or any other storage are treated one by one, completing wiping of the data
is done and then these are sold at various online sources like eBay, Amazon,
etc. Sometimes SIMS even enter into a contract where they will share a
certain of the profit with the companies for getting regular business.
If none of this works there’s an alternative to it. RECYCLING
De-manufacturing: This only remains as an option available to the company. Here a lot of
folks’ work, de-packaging or de-manufacturing the waste from their plastic
containers, they remove hazards like batteries or other kinds of flammable
items, before they are sent to the shredder, AKA SALLY. Leaving items
like mercury, lead and toner can lead to dangerous fires, and then there’s
plastic acting as a fuel source and if left in lands then can affect a large
portion of land.
Grinding: Laurie Arnold, Assistant Supervisor, Sims Lifecycle
services runs the shredder, AKA Sally with a mouse. The machine has 400
Horse Power engine running Quad blades making teeth’s grinding up all the
materials. First thing to be done is pulling out all the steel. And the work
is done by placing a large magnet at the top of the disposal basket of the
machine.
Differencing: Then Heidi, separates plastics and she uses infrared machinery to
differentiate. After this, Ingrid takes us to
Ginger (named after the engineer who designed her), she is their
metal finder, she takes out any possible metal left out within the plastics.
What’s left goes to Otto, the Dutch sink float machine, here all that
is left is dumped and any thing other than plastic sinks to the bottom. The
product from those are sent to HP (Hewlet Peckard) for being reused into
parts.
Selling: The waste as shown before have different metals some more precious than
others. Metals are separated like,
Copper and other precious metals go to the Copper Smelter in Canada or
in Europe or Japan, the steel will go to a steel mill here in Tennessee.
Concluding, in 2019, an estimate $57 billion, worth of precious
metals and valuables in electronics were thrown away or burned. If we
recycle it then we are not just digging or mining around for
extracting virgin metals from the earths core. This can be an
alternative to expensing all that energy or damaging the environment.
But there’s a CATCH-22 recycling e-waste can be money maker and good
for the environment but its both really hard and expensive to do. The
electronics are not designed to be recycled many different compounds
all smashed together when devices got smaller. Treating all these
materials is both dangerous and pricy. Recyclers consistently need to
update the machinery with the changing technology, and that’s costly
too. With all these challenges e-waste is expected to increase about
38% in the next decade. So, is there a way to make e-recycling easier.
Some say it starts with manufacturers, Right now most manufacturers
are focused on selling a trendy product rather than making their
products live a long time. Scientists think it would be helpful that
if manufacturers start manufacturing the products that are meant to be
recycled would make it easier for example making products that don’t
have toxins so they are safer and easier to break down. But until that
happens all the hard to recycled and to be either burned or
shredded.
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