At Hewlett-Packard Co's recycling plant, a giant machine with brick-sized blades thunders away, crushing personal computers, servers and printers to bits.
Despite all the noise, the machine is part of a quiet movement in the high-tech world -- the recycling of PCs and other electronics, which are filled with toxic chemicals but rarely disposed of properly.
For a fee, HP now will pick up any manufacturer's electronics from customers who sign up on a Web site. Businesses negotiate a contract to pay HP for the recycling service.
"This is something HP is doing because we should," said Renee St Denis, HP Environmental Business manager. It's not something we do for money."
HP's recycling program, which started in 1997, is one of the recent attempts to deal with the millions of electronics bits and pieces that are sitting in garages and business storerooms because they can't be thrown away.
The cathode ray tubes in computer monitors are particularly toxic, with lead, mercury and cadmium. In California, the tubes were declared hazardous waste this year, which makes disposing of them even more difficult because they are no longer allowed in landfills.
"The lead is there to protect us from getting radiated from our televisions and our monitors," said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, a policy group trying to raise awareness of the need for recycling electronics. "But that lead is in a form that can easily migrate into the environment and impact the environment and impact human health."
Experts say programs like Hewlett-Packard's are a good start, but add that not enough companies are facing the problem. They say there aren't enough agencies to handle the volume, the cost of collection is high and there isn't a simple system in place. The company is not sure how much more the volume will increase, but it gets hundreds of calls a month from people wanting the service, said HP spokeswoman Rebeca Robboy. According to a 1999 survey by Stanford Resources Inc, a technology research firm, about 500 million PCs are expected to be obsolete by 2007.
"The infrastructure right now is being overwhelmed, and we're maybe recycling at a 10 to 15 percent rate," Murray said.
HP chargesUS$13 to US$34 for each item it recycles -- including computers made by other companies -- and says the fees are used to pay for the recycling program.
The company first figures out which computers still work and can be fixed up to be resold. Those that can't are mined for working parts, and the rest of the computer is run through the Roseville machine.
Precious metals are harvested, and the plastic pieces -- reduced to the size of nickels -- are sent to a smelter to be turned into energy. Even the dust from the crushing is sent to a smelter. Every part of the computer is sent to a place where it can be reused, so nothing winds up in landfills.
IBM Corp, which also has a recycling operation, charges US$29.99 per item. Gateway Inc has a trade-in program that offers a rebate of up to US$50 on a new computer. It donates old machines that still work to organizations such as Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army, and recycles machines that can't be used.
In hopes of broadening programs like these, a group of manufacturers, environmentalists and governments have formed a National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative that will spend the next year coming up with ideas. Whatever agreements emerge will not be binding.
RSS