It’s fi nally time to put that old rig down,
but what happens to your PC in the
afterlife?
r & d BREAKING DOWN TECH —PRESENT AND FUTURE
V
ery few of the components in your
PC are biodegradable—and many are
toxic—so dumping your old gear in a landfi ll
is not only foolish but illegal. Besides, so
many places will accept electronic waste
these days that’s there’s really no excuse for
not recycling your old rig.
Once your PC shuffl es off to that great
Start Menu in the sky, technicians can trans-
plant its viable parts into ailing in-use systems.
But if it’s too rickety for that procedure, recy-
clers can reincarnate it into an entirely new
product. We fi nd inner peace imagining our
otherwise useless PII coming back as a fl ower
pot or a pair of running shoes.REUSE
Whether you drop off your old PC at your
local landfi ll’s e-waste center or donate it
to a charity such as Goodwill Industries,
there’s a good chance it will wind up at a
large domestic recycler. These recyclers
facilitate and manage the entire process,
even if they’re not equipped to handle
each and every step. First, the organization
logs the PC into its tracking system; next,
employees assess the PC’s quality as a
whole as well as its individual parts.
If the system functions properly and is not
wholly obsolete—the line is typically drawn at
Pentium 3–class machines—it can be donated
or even resold intact. If it doesn’t meet those
benchmarks, components (typically RAM,
optical drives, and processors) that meet the
company’s quality standards are extracted
and delivered to wholesalers or refurbishers. In
fact, nearly everything can be salvaged. Some
vendors even buy undamaged cases and
other cosmetic parts.
Although we recommend that you purge
the data from any hard drive you discard,
some recycling fi rms, such as the Texas-
based TechTurn, will do it for you: “Our test
department performs a functional test on the
equipment,” explains William Long, TechTurn’s
vice president of strategic partners, “and then
erases all of the data from the hard drive and
any other electronic media... in accordancewith U.S. Department
of Defense standards.”
TechTurn accomplishes
this by overwriting each
sector with either random
data or zeroes several
times. If a bad sector pre-
vents a rewrite, the recycler
will typically physically
destroy the unit.REDUCE
The actual recycling
begins with a tear down
and general parts sorting.
Some recyclers manually
divide the components
into numerous streams,
organized by part (hard
drive, optical drive, key-
board) or commodity
(plastic, copper, aluminum,
steel); commodities are
then passed on to spe-
cialty recyclers.
Hewlett-Packard
recycles some PCs by
removing hazardous mate-
rials, such as batteries, and then dumping
the entire machine into a powerful shredder. In
other cases, the company will remove printed
circuit boards and then shred the enclosure.
Either way, the recyclable materials are auto-
matically sorted as they move down the disas-
sembly line.
The shredder mulches the computers into
successively smaller pieces until they’re coin
size. As they pass over an 8mm wire mesh,
soft metals such as gold, silver, and copper fall
through. Magnets lift steel out of the pile, and
the remaining rubble is dumped onto another
conveyor belt and zapped with electricity. This
action assigns a positive charge to any alu-
minum material in the debris. Just before the
material reaches the end of the belt, a second
positive charge ripples through it, which repels
the aluminum bits and fl ings them into another
sorting bin. At this point, the only material lefton the belt is non-conducting plastic, which is
dumped into a fi nal collection bin.
Shredding is a less-common recycling
technique because the process tends to eject
particles that workers might inhale. But HP’s
Tatyana Kjellberg, consumer program man-
ager for the company’s Product Take Back
service, tells us the company’s employees are
well protected: “There are gloves and glasses
at all times. When working close to the shred-
der and the metal-separating plant, they wear
hard hats, just in case. [In] the shredding
and separating section, there’s a huge fi lter
attached to all the different separating sec-
tions. If there’s any dust or particles fl oating
around, it pulls them in like a big vacuum.”
Kjellberg maintains that HP’s air-fi ltration
system is so extensive that the company’s
employees don’t need to wear respirators or
even masks.BY ZACK STERN70 MAXIMUMPC | MAR 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
White Paper: PC Recycling
A massive shredder reduces aging electronics to quarter-
size chunks at Hewlett-Packard’s recycling center in
Roseville, California.