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Japan's War On E-Waste
Stonent1 writes "With the increasing number of high tech devices in Japan filling landfills, Japan has taken a proactive approach to E-waste. BBC News has an interesting article on Matsushita's electronics recycling plant. For example, TV and monitor tubes are opened with a special tool and separated into leaded and unleaded glass, melted and reused in new displays! The plastic housing is also melted down and reused. Sounds like a good idea for the U.S., too."
The discussion thusfar seems to have identified two major issues (and one minor one) that must be overcome before such a program could exist in the United States.
1. Land - We've got a lot of it over here, but the bottleneck to starting something like this is probably not so much a question of whether or not its easier to make landfills. The question is one of transport. How can any recycling operation afford to ship 22 pounds (10 kg) of monitor from an office in Lemmon, SD, once every 6 months, and still hope to turn a profit? Japan has the "advantage" of being compact. We don't.
2. Law - Landfills are cheap & easy. Recycling is less profitable. Will we be trying to implement this state by state? Does the federal government have any authority to mandate such a disposal regime under the interstate commerce power?
3. Will the RIAA object to anyone recycling a DRM enabled device under the DMCA?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Unfortunately what they don't tell you is that about 80% of the collected e-waste is shipped to third world countries. See export harm at:. htm
http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/technotrash
Dell uses prison labor to do their recycling. Recycling is usually pulling some parts which have little value and sending the rest overseas and to landfills.
However, there are systems such as plasma torch processes at ~8000 degrees C that are non-polluting
(everything is closed cycle) which can recover all the raw chemicals. Japan has these plants for household waste. Unfortunately no venture capitalist in the U.S. will back one (~10M) since they only have good profit returns rather than 10X returns in 2 years. I know, I wrote a business plan for one and found out disinterested they are in plants with just 'good' profit returns. My own university 'venture office' laughed and said come back when I had a biotech or computer idea.