26 Jul 2007 12:30
Electronics recycling programs are garnering much more attention these days. The 200,000 square-foot HP Recycling Center in Roseville, California, is one place where computer equipment, printing supplies, rechargeable batteries and other items go to die.
Items collected by HP, like these cathode-ray tubes from monitors, are sent directly to a smelter because they contain mercury bulbs, which are considered hazardous to the environment.
In the central control room of the Roseville facility, the operator can control and monitor the recycling operations on machines throughout the building.
Here, hardware components are ground into small pieces. Then, the various elements, such as steel, plastic and precious metals, are automatically separated out and sorted.
A giant magnet separates the steel pieces and drops them down a chute, where the bits are collected in large bins and shipped away to be reused in new computers.
The recovered parts are also used to make new products, including auto body parts, clothes hangers, plastic toys, fence posts, serving trays and roof tiles.
Each month, the HP Recycling Center processes more than four million pounds of materials. To date, the company says it has recycled more than 920 million pounds of hardware and HP print cartridges globally.
At the HP recycling facility, small bits of ground-up hardware from computers around the US are run through a series of shakers that sort the pieces.
Technology commonly used in the workplace contains potentially hazardous material and toxic chemicals. Batteries are especially dangerous, and require special handling to ensure the waste does not end up in landfills, polluting the environment.
Stacks of used hardware sit in the warehouse just north of Sacramento, California, ready to be recycled and reused. Materials collected in just one week are nearly overflowing in the huge building.
Pounds upon pounds of plastic are boxed after being run through the sorter as they are prepared for reuse.
Reporter Erica Ogg (right), from ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, CNET News.com, interviews employees of HP's Roseville facility. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the inception of HP recycling programs, which now operate in more than 40 countries, regions and territories, the company says.
Before being sent through the shredder, computer and electronics parts have to be separated by hand. Here, motherboards await destruction.
A worker at the recycling facility gets down to the business of ripping apart a laptop, separating the screen from the body in preparation for reuse and recycling.
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