I toured yesterday the new e-waste processing facility that ECS Refining spent the last couple of years building in Stockton, California. It's an impressive operation covering something like 100,000sqft (at least) but I was surprised at how much manual labor is still involved.
CRT televisions and monitors are still manually disassembled to get the materials separated which they say is cost-effective and gets a better output material than whole-unit shredders. As an aside, they are putting together a wood recycling system onsite as well to deal with all the wooden cabinets and broken pallets that will be used as feed stock for power generators. The manual labor involved in preparing a CRT for crushing was a surprise. After the yolk and cathode cable is removed and the tip with the contacts is broken off (also to de-evacuate the CRT) and the metal band around the edge is cut and removed, even the labels are ground off by a guy with a disc cutter with a circular brushed mounted. They say the paper would contaminate the cullet. They also pass the CRTs thru a UV light to see which ones have a leaded shield screen. If you don't know there is a separate glass screen in front of the CRT that is fixed on, and some are leaded and some are not. The leaded ones go right into the crusher because that glass will go off to the lead smelter, while the ones with non-leaded screens will be separated further so that the non-leaded glass can go straight for glass recycling. Again, I was amazed at how manually intensive their operation is but they claim it is more economical than simply a whole-unit grinder as they get a much cleaner material output stream.
The most interesting machine to me was the automatic sorter that sorts out random material after it is shredded. They take all kinds of basic consumer electronics like VCRs, DVD players, stereos, coffee makers, printers, scanners, copiers, overheard projectors, etc. and do some manual pick and sort of some of the larger plastic materials and such and then shred it all up. Then they put the shredded material through the automated sorter which picks out base and precious metals bearing material such as circuit boards and aluminum heatsinks or copper yolks while passing on all the dross like plastic and glass.
After being shred the material dumps out onto a larger shaker table that distributes the stream of shredded material out over a 4 foot wide channel that then deposits the spread out material onto a conveyer belt maybe 10 feet long which must have been going 30MPH. As the material travels down the belt there are sensors underneath that detect metallics. From there the controller knows how fast the object is traveling and at what point it will fall off the edge of the belt. As soon as it does, a jet of air directed right over the path where that piece is traveling will blast out and shove that piece down into a hopper for metallics that feeds into another sorter that further sorts based on eddy currents while the rest of the material (the dross) goes on to be processed further. There must be a few dozen air jets aligned across the width of the belt so that the machine can precisely direct an air blast right over the piece that is passing under the jet. The pieces on average were about 4-9 square inches--2"x2", 2"x3", 3"x3" sized pieces roughly. I'm sure there is a correct term for describing the size in the industry lingo. This is the machine that really awed me. It's a marvel of engineering. The precision with which the airjets knock down the materials with values is quite a sight, and to hear all those air jets going off sporadically is neat.
It was a very interesting visit and overall I was impressed with what they have done. They say it is the largest e-waste processing facility in North America, quite possibly in the western hemisphere and maybe even in the entire world and they claim it is the most technologically advanced. I will not argue with that claim as either way it is a most estimable operation. It gave me many ideas...if only I had a multi-million dollar budget and 100,000sqft of warehouse space.
CRT televisions and monitors are still manually disassembled to get the materials separated which they say is cost-effective and gets a better output material than whole-unit shredders. As an aside, they are putting together a wood recycling system onsite as well to deal with all the wooden cabinets and broken pallets that will be used as feed stock for power generators. The manual labor involved in preparing a CRT for crushing was a surprise. After the yolk and cathode cable is removed and the tip with the contacts is broken off (also to de-evacuate the CRT) and the metal band around the edge is cut and removed, even the labels are ground off by a guy with a disc cutter with a circular brushed mounted. They say the paper would contaminate the cullet. They also pass the CRTs thru a UV light to see which ones have a leaded shield screen. If you don't know there is a separate glass screen in front of the CRT that is fixed on, and some are leaded and some are not. The leaded ones go right into the crusher because that glass will go off to the lead smelter, while the ones with non-leaded screens will be separated further so that the non-leaded glass can go straight for glass recycling. Again, I was amazed at how manually intensive their operation is but they claim it is more economical than simply a whole-unit grinder as they get a much cleaner material output stream.
The most interesting machine to me was the automatic sorter that sorts out random material after it is shredded. They take all kinds of basic consumer electronics like VCRs, DVD players, stereos, coffee makers, printers, scanners, copiers, overheard projectors, etc. and do some manual pick and sort of some of the larger plastic materials and such and then shred it all up. Then they put the shredded material through the automated sorter which picks out base and precious metals bearing material such as circuit boards and aluminum heatsinks or copper yolks while passing on all the dross like plastic and glass.
After being shred the material dumps out onto a larger shaker table that distributes the stream of shredded material out over a 4 foot wide channel that then deposits the spread out material onto a conveyer belt maybe 10 feet long which must have been going 30MPH. As the material travels down the belt there are sensors underneath that detect metallics. From there the controller knows how fast the object is traveling and at what point it will fall off the edge of the belt. As soon as it does, a jet of air directed right over the path where that piece is traveling will blast out and shove that piece down into a hopper for metallics that feeds into another sorter that further sorts based on eddy currents while the rest of the material (the dross) goes on to be processed further. There must be a few dozen air jets aligned across the width of the belt so that the machine can precisely direct an air blast right over the piece that is passing under the jet. The pieces on average were about 4-9 square inches--2"x2", 2"x3", 3"x3" sized pieces roughly. I'm sure there is a correct term for describing the size in the industry lingo. This is the machine that really awed me. It's a marvel of engineering. The precision with which the airjets knock down the materials with values is quite a sight, and to hear all those air jets going off sporadically is neat.
It was a very interesting visit and overall I was impressed with what they have done. They say it is the largest e-waste processing facility in North America, quite possibly in the western hemisphere and maybe even in the entire world and they claim it is the most technologically advanced. I will not argue with that claim as either way it is a most estimable operation. It gave me many ideas...if only I had a multi-million dollar budget and 100,000sqft of warehouse space.
