Shredding and mechanical sorting may soon greatly alter “design for recycling” considerations in the electronics equipment industry.
Presenters Monday at the International Symposium on Electronics & the Environment in San Francisco stopped short of saying designing for recycling would become passé. But mechanical processing may already be rendering as unnecessary many of the initial easy disassembly considerations that seemed important just a few years ago.
For much of the previous decades, the message from recyclers to computer manufacturers was fairly unanimous. Disassemblers want them to design machines to be easy to take apart, while materials recyclers wanted them to use fewer materials, including a limited number and color of plastic resins.
The increasing use of automation may be changing the urgency of that message, according to Rudolf Auer and two colleagues from Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, Calif, and Cal-Berkeley graduate student Eric Masanet.
The four conducted a series of interviews with recyclers to prioritize design for recycling guidelines for Apple. “A frequent prediction made during the interview process was that automated disassembly systems were likely to replace manual disassembly systems in the future,” the study noted.
This major shift is making such one-time priorities as the use of snap-fit assemblies and the use of ISO labels move toward the background. “ISO labels have no effect on the recyclability of plastic parts” in automated shredding and sorting operations, the study’s authors concluded.
Even the coordinated use of one plastic resin or one color may be fading as a priority. “We got feedback from recyclers not to worry about color,” Eric Masanet told symposium attendees.
The lessening of this priority is due less to recycling methods and more to a grudging acknowledgement that the market does not want uniform-appearing computers. “There is too much of a variety available to be managed from a recycling viewpoint,” said Masanet.
Symposium attendees also heard a success story from Sony Electronics Inc., San Diego. Doug Smith, with the company’s corporate environmental affairs department, described a process designed by Sony engineers who are using reclaimed plant trays and other scrap to create secondary resin pellets used to make interior speaker boxes for Sony televisions. The process saves those involved from $115 to $515 per ton of material used, depending on the price of the secondary resin and the cost of tipping fees avoided.
Smith believes that for product take-back systems to work, more such uses must be discovered. “What’s the point of taking any of this back if we’re not going to use it?” he asked attendees. “But if it’s a valuable raw material, why not take it back an re-use it?”