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Tech firms go green as e-waste mounts

Posted March 04, 2007 6:53 PM

From USATODAY.com Tech - Top Stories:

Roseville, Calif. — This is where computers go to die a green death. Inside Hewlett-Packard Co.'s cavernous recycling plant in the Sacramento suburbs, truckloads of obsolete PCs, servers and printers collected from consumers and businesses nationwide are cracked open by goggled workers who pull out batteries, circuit boards and other potentially hazardous components. The electronic carcasses are fed into a massive machine that noisily shreds them into tiny pieces and mechanically sorts the fragments into piles of steel, aluminum, plastic and precious metals. Those scraps are sent to smelting plants, mostly in the Sacramento area, where they are melted down for reuse. The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology's relentless expansion. HP and Dell Inc., which together sell more than half the country's PCs, are earning praise from environmentalists for using more eco-friendly components and recycling their products when consumers discard them.

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Guru
United Kingdom - Member - Indeterminate Engineering Fields - Control Engineering - New Member

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#1

Re: Tech firms go green as e-waste mounts

03/06/2007 7:04 AM

In the UK, such equipment is already covered by the Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment directive, colloquially known as WEEE.

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Power-User
Canada - Member - BC Born, Alberta Raised, Quebec (poutine) crazed... Engineering Fields - Aerospace Engineering - An airplane is just a bunch of beams... Hobbies - Model Rocketry - Had fun as a kid...fun stuff Hobbies - CNC - dreaming of cutting Engineering Fields - Control Engineering - PID ME!

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#2

Re: Tech firms go green as e-waste mounts

03/06/2007 7:32 AM

I know of a lot of smaller shops that "recycle"...and a couple big ones. I've never actually found out if they just strip whatever is useful and then sell the rest as scrap or not. I've never seen or heard of any mass shipping of old computers to some centralized recycling center (a la HP in sacramento) but it would be nice if they're at least not just tossed in someone else's garbage.

I used to work in a store where we would collect trade ins for a company that was selling their new product...the old ones were to be recycled...they actually ended up in a big warehouse in the midwest since nobody KNEW HOW to recycle them. Nice gesture to prevent waste or deceptive marketing?...you decide.

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Guru
United Kingdom - Member - Indeterminate Engineering Fields - Control Engineering - New Member

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#3
In reply to #2

Re: Tech firms go green as e-waste mounts

03/06/2007 7:36 AM

It's a bit silly. If one goes into one's local model shop in the UK and buys a new electric locomotive for a model railway, the shop is obliged to accept any old one offered free of charge to the consumer and to aggregate them for an approved waste recycling contractor. There is no such requirement for a clockwork one or for non-motorised vehicles, of for unusable model aircraft engines.

What a load of old codswallop.....

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