China bans toxic American computer junk

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Sun Jun 9 23:09:45 2002

> William, I hope you don't take this personally but you don't have a
> clue about what you're talking about!

Great, another flame war. I love this list.

> Not when it's <2 microns thick and only <40% gold!

Not all of it is this bad - a lot is still 8-12 micron and 90 percent
gold. Anyway, in quantity (as I pointed out it must be done in large
numbers to turn a profit), gold is still gold, even mixed with other
metals. Many scrappers do not trade in the metal itself, but rather the
metal in solution or in some other impure state. Refineries will take the
metal in all sorts of forms.

> I guess that depends on what your idea of "extract" is. They might
> extract 98% of the USEFULL (ie profitable) material

It is actually 98 percent by weight.

> Big companies
> sell/give their surplus to fly-by-night companies that PROMISE to recycle
> it but once they get it it's another story.

While the scrap market is full of crooks and cheats, they are actually
going away as they simply can not compete anymore. Simply put, scrappers
will try to get money out of anything they can.

> Obviously you don't know anything about the scrap or trash
> businesses.

I just work with it, and have a buddy that is one of the larger
military electronic scrap dealers on the East Coast. He (and more his
father) have scrapped more computers that most (including SEAC,
apparently) - 10000s of tons.

> (1)the drivers are usually too ignorant to know what's worth anything and
> much too busy to have the time to worry about it.

The drivers are not the ones making any decisions (sometimes they do -
around here they have some rules about what they leave behind). I said
nothing about drivers.

> (2) dumps don't put out
> anything, it ALL goes into the landfill.

Some places yes, someplaces no. As I said in a previous mail, it depends
on the firms and the dumps. Most of the time the dumps and haulers are
different companies.

> I once asked some dump employees
> if they ever took any of the stuff home and they told that they were NOT
> allowed to and that they had been warned that they WOULD be fired
> IMMEDIATELY if they were ever caught taking ANYTHING from the trash.

This is irrelevant. I said nothing about taking stuff home.

> (3) The dumps/landfills and their employees have NO connection with the
> scrappers. They don't even know who they are or that they even exist.

Maybe the ones you have dealt with.

> Wrong again. It could potenially save them money of dump fees but it
> would cost them a lot more for the manpower, space and equipment needed to
> soft the stuff.

Dump fees are getting outrageous, and this is not a really great sort, by
any stretch of the imagination.

> In addition, the dump trucks have compactors built into
> them so that they can crush and compact the trash as they collect it so
> that they can carry more in the truck.

Just because the machines are crushed does not mean they are somehow
fused to the rest of the garbage.

> TANTALUM? Show me some Tantalum in a modern PC!

Yes, many PeeCess use tantalum. Check out the price of tantalum some day.
You may be shocked.

> HIGH grade gold fingers (edge connctors) from circuit boards USED to be
> worth about 1 cent per contact.

I do not deny that gold scrap was better in the old days. If anything, it
was too good (wasteful).

> But the PC quality fingers are of a lot
> lower quality (and value) and in addition gold has dropped 2/3 in value
> in the last couple of years.

Once again, process more and stockpile the scrap and wait for the value to
rise (as it has been lately).

> And a location with VERY lax environmental laws (NJ seems to be a
> favorite!) so that they can dispose of the waste that they create when
> they extract the worthwhile materials.

If properly done, gold refining is a very closed-loop process.
Certainly some very nasty chemicals are involved, but these chemicals are
recycled during the process. Very little "leaks out". Also, most
scrappers do not do their own refining, because of the danger. It is very
hazardous (it can kill you quite easily). Nearly all of them send their
material to a refinery.

There are very few (relatively) refineries around that can hand you a bar
of gold in return for your scrap because of the strict environmental
laws. Essentially, no more licenses for gold refineries will ever be
issued. These are not fly-by-night operations, and are very strictly
controlled.

> You may be right up to a point. But OTOH we aren't likely to pay the
> cost of disassembling the stuff and removing the tubes and then disposing
> of them as hazardous waste and still GIVE the stuff to China are we? So
> will sending the other remains to China be economicly feasable? Probably
> not.

They will pay good money. The tubes are now our problem.

> Furthermore, the tubes aren't the only hazardous material in the
> e-scrap. Go back and read the article that started this thread. Burning
> wire and plastic to recover the metals creates toxic fumes,

In the US at least, wire buring has been out of fashion for many many
years. These days, the wire is shredded, with the resulting mess being
dumped into a seperator. The latter unit basically works with water - the
insulation floats to the surface and the metal sinks to the bottom.
Simple and very effective.

> the heavy
> metals such as cadnium, nickel and lead pollute the land and water,

The heavy metals are hard to deal with. So far the best solution seems to
be more shredding, but at a finer level. With these newer systems,
circuit boards go in, and powder comes out. The idea is with enough
shredding, the broken down bits will eventually all be individual
materials. For example, with enough shredding, many of the individual
very small grains will be pure copper from the traces, and can be pulled
out using various means. Obviously some of the grains are mixed metals,
but most are not.

Of course, it all depends on how far the scrapper wants to go. Many just
take all of the components off boards with something similar to a giant
scraper, and pitch the boards. It really depends on what the scrap is and
how much the scrapper can do profitably.

> manually breaking the glass and plastic is a hazard to the workers

With the tubes, the good bits are mostly on the yoke - no glass needs to
be broken. One screw will generally allow the yoke to slide off. There is
so little good stuff in the electron guns that they are not worth fooling
around with.

Even with the yokes off, there just is not enough return for the little
bit of copper. That is why we would dump the tubes elsewhere (to clarify
- by tube I mean the whole video monitor with case, circuitboard, CRT,
and all).

> and I'm
> sure that there are other problems that we haven't even thought of so it
> looks to me like the days of dumping the stuff in China or other third
> world countries are over with.

Well, the days of dumping our tubes are pretty much over. They never
wanted them anyway, and now they have a real excuse to reject them. As
said before, it is a self correcting problem, as tubes fall to flatpanels.

By the way, Joe, you are now going to be ignored.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Sun Jun 09 2002 - 23:09:45 BST