How 6 Million Pounds Of Electronic Waste Gets Recycled A Month | Big Business

these are old printers computers and phones and this machine's shredding them to be recycled only about 17 of all electronic waste ends up like this it's very hard to recycle electronics they're not designed to be recycled there are hundreds of tiny pieces hidden in every device from toxic materials to plastic to gold and they each have to be separated and recycled individually such precision takes lots of people space and heavy duty machines with a good deal of feminine power sally is our big shredder heidi is german ginger's our metal finder female dominant machines of course

yes and if everything goes right there's lots of money to be made we'll pull off the pieces which will be of value that's ingrid president of sims lifecycle services one of the largest e-recyclers in the u.s ingrid took us through her biggest facility to see how it's repurposing or recycling up to six million pounds of old electronics every month so we're in laverne tennessee just outside of nashville this is a 200 000 square foot facility where we focus on receiving processing electronics sims mainly gets electronic waste from office gear like laptops computers printers or phones

we have fortune 500 companies like hp and lexmark insurance companies banks the rest of its clients are secret but ingrid can tell us what happens to these devices once they get here reuse repurpose re-engineer if we can't reuse it very last resort is recycling what you see here is where we first get the material in it's a fifo type of process first in first out that's how we work it here she's offloading a truck so she'll go in get her forks into the pallet and pull it out it's supposed to come from an office refresh

it looks like there's some old dvd players some old stereo equipment the first stop the scale then they will get the weight and input it into our data center and that's what drew is doing over there with the computer then it gets tagged with a barcode it'll tell us whether we go to destroy recycle or we go to reuse the building's broken up into recycling on the right and reuse on the left we'll start here if we can reuse it and reuse the parts then you're not making a new part so this is the hard

harvesting area for laptops sometimes when you can't sell the whole laptop we can remove parts from it and either rebuild a laptop to sell or sell the parts to get all these tiny pieces out of the device without hurting them it takes a lot of skill and different screws a lot of different screws so much of it still needs to be done manually and to do it properly and that's very labor intensive memory units processors screens keyboards and motherboards can all be reused workers will clean them check that they're functioning and send them back into

inventory to be sold again lots of times when we're allowed to sell units we'll do revenue share with it so we'll share revenue with the client so that's kind of a nice way to add life to the electronics and then also get some revenue back big hard drives pulled from computers or servers are another money maker but they come with an added challenge of security you can see the fence up you need a key card to get in i don't know if i have access oh i do so here is where you'll see the higher

value material any stored data has to be wiped before a drive can be resold we have a lot of banks and insurance companies as our clients so you can well imagine that those folks want their data erased properly this is where you'll see some of the wiping going on of the hard drives at the end here these have already been done so they're ready to go to the next step to get resold so our drives will sell wholesale or on ebay you can see these guys are deemed for ebay so you'll see one terabyte 500

gigabytes all different size drives these smaller drives there just isn't any value in it anymore so something simply not worth sims time to refurbish it's sent to be recycled on the other side is destroy recycle and over here we have a lot of folks that are de-packaging and also removing hazards this part's called demanufacturing so we'll remove hazards batteries and all that type of thing before it goes to be shredded on this side there's a lot of hazardous materials in electronics like mercury cadmium and lead and if devices end up in landfills that bad stuff

could do major damage to groundwater and soil this is what we want to ensure does not go into the shredder because this could be really dangerous for fire if we leave toner in there i mean it it goes up like nothing toner is explosive and then the plastic acts as a fuel source that's our biggest challenge everything that's not hazardous gets shredded so this is lori and lori is running the shredder all with a mouse right hurry this is the control room i have patrolled at my chosen shredder on the belt i can stop the

belt i can speed it up i can jog it it's a 400 horsepower quad shredder which means you have these teeth that are grinding up all the material here and those are nice printers that are getting eaten up and ground out to this on the outside this is really really cool part it's very noisy the first thing that we're trying to do is remove any steel a giant magnet overhead pulls out all the steel this is where the charge is added to the material and based on the plus and minus will repel so the aluminum

gets thrown the farthest away so that's why aluminum is here and the circuit board is in the middle and the plastic falls right down because it doesn't accept the charge the leftover mix heads to another machine named heidi heidi is german originally we were using it to separate plastic but the technology wasn't keeping up it doesn't work on black plastic and you see today everything's black plastic now heidi separates everything using infrared technology ginger's our metal finder she was named after the engineer who designed her because he had a ginger beard and ginger is just

taking out any further metal that's still within the plastic event what's left goes into the dutch sink float machine named auto so i guess that's the only male machine we have in auto plastic floats while everything else sinks we scoop off the top the good stuff and that's what will go to montreal to our plastic compounder and then goes back to hp to get reused into parts and those raw materials can make sims some pretty good money so we really want to recover that value every electronic has precious metals in it some gold some copper

some platinum some palladium so all these elements can be separated and sold to be reused piecemeal the copper and precious metal streams will go to a copper smelter in canada or in europe or japan the steel will go to a steel mill here in tennessee but with more than 75 percent of e-waste landfill bound companies are missing out on huge profits to put it in perspective in 2019 an estimated 57 billion dollars worth of precious metals and valuables and electronics or thrown away or burned if we recycle it then we're not digging holes and mining

for virgin metals it's a way to get some really precious commodities without expending all that energy and damage to the environment but it's a catch-22 recycling e-waste could be a money-maker and it's better for the environment but it's both really hard and expensive to do they're not designed to be recycled many different chemical compounds all smashed together when devices got smaller and smaller removing whole components became less and less possible treating and disposing of these hazardous materials is dangerous and pricey recyclers also have to constantly upgrade machines and processes to keep up with this changing

technology and that's costly too we normally change the blades once a year and when it gets towards the end the blades get a bit dull that's when we get a little bit anxious and sometimes they're jams sims has invested a thousand hours updating just its sally the shredder machine and while recyclers are facing all of these challenges e-waste is only expected to increase by 38 over the next decade so is there a way to make e-recycling easier some say it starts with manufacturers what a lot of the manufacturers are focused on rather than making products

live a long time they see their way out is to keep selling as many products as they can as rapidly as possible and they try to compensate by saying don't worry it's recyclable and so this churn and burn mentality is very harmful jim thinks one solution could be for manufacturers to create electronics that are actually meant to be recycled for example making devices that don't have toxins so they're safer and easier to break down but until that happens sims will keep wiping and shredding those hard to recycle electronics