Slashdot Mirror
Some Recyclers Give Up On Recycling Old Monitors And TVs (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
"In many cases, your old TV isn't recycled at all and is instead abandoned in a warehouse somewhere, left for society to deal with sometime in the future," reports Motherboard, describing the problem of old cathode-ray televisions and computer monitors with "a net negative recycling value" (since their component parts don't cover the cost of dismantling them). An estimated 705 million CRT TVs were sold in the U.S. since 1980, and many now sit in television graveyards, "an environmental and economic disaster with no clear solution." As much as 100,000 tons of potentially hazardous waste are stockpiled in two Ohio warehouses of the now-insolvent recycler Closed Loop, plus "at least 25,000 tons of glass and unprocessed CRTs in Arizona...much of it is sitting in a mountainous pile outside one of the warehouses."
One EPA report found 23,000 tons of lead-containing CRT glass abandoned in four different states just in 2013.
One EPA report found 23,000 tons of lead-containing CRT glass abandoned in four different states just in 2013.
I take my old monitors (CRT and LCD alike) to a place where I pay a somewhat hefty fee to recycle (I think around $20-$40). That's the best I can do to ensure they actually will be recycled, rather than taking it somewhere that supposedly would handle them for free... I do the same for pretty much any electronic device.
I know that's no guarantee but you do the best you can. Besides, even a warehouse full of dead monitors that will basically just sit forever is still a way better scenario than having them polluting a landfill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Chuck it all in the Grand Canyon. Plenty of room in there, believe me folks, it's yuuuuge.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One serious use is as 'practice victims' for beginning newbies to electronics to play with, as practice in the dextrous tasks of dismantling, identifying, etc, and in the fun you can have in reusing what works. Playing with broke stuff frees you from the risk of expensive mistakes.
John_Chalisque
Well, if they're not filling it with radioactive waste, why not store other junk in the caves at Yucca Mountain?
six years ago, a group of college students (for class credit) followed a CRT TV (GPS unit embedded ) from recycle bin to its final destination. it was never recycled
since the GPS continued to work. they lost the signal after it left San Juan when it was sent outside the USA.
How much do you want to make a bet it landed in the Atlantic Ocean?
http://saveie6.com/
A volunteer can easily tear apart 4 of these per hour if given proper training, tools, and work area. I am pretty sure if the labor cost of separating out glass, boards, copper, and other components were zero, then the net return would no longer be negative. And there are plenty of people who need to clock some verified community service and/or other volunteer time; and hundreds of times more people who want to do it just to feel good about themselves.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Glass is an amorphous solid that is porous if you look under an electron microscope. It slowly dissolves in water (very slowly) and therefore continuously leaches whatever compounds it is composed of. It probably wouldn't be a big problem for local water if you dumped a few big CRT TVs here and there, but if you put a mountain of it somewhere and let it leach into the soil, it could get into the local groundwater. Look, if we want capitalism to survive and not destroy us and the planet while people are making a buck, we need to clean up after ourselves. You don't crap on the living room rug.
Here is my lab's journal article on glass leaching:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass,
True, and true, with reservations. Somebody has got to pay for keeping the lead from escaping into groundwater. Should it be everyone, or the people who benefited from the use of the lead?
And if everyone pays, human nature being what it is people will pay to make the problem "go away" without looking too closely at the details, where "go away" includes "making it someone else's problem."
The thing is, if you could completely internalize all those expenses so the cost of dealing with never just "went away", the market would do a fine job of efficiently managing lead and disposal management as a resource. But that doesn't happen naturally, by itself.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Repair manuals occur only in user-serviceable animals.
One problem adding to the debris-littered future you (accurately) describe is that the corporate advantages of proprietisation, miniaturisation, and planned obsolescence have convened to create a profit model with a steadfast tenet: do not make ANYTHING user-serviceable.
From vacuum cleaners, to power drills, to phones and everything else in between and surrounding, nothing is made user serviceable any more. Try opening up one of the latest mostly-plastic vacuum cleaners. Many of them are made to be snapped together during assembly and not to come back apart, ever. Even routine cleaning is a huge hassle, especially with components that can't be opened up. And power drills, don't get me started. There are power drills from WW2 that still run perfectly even if the brushes haven't been oiled in 20 years. You can open the up and clean, repair, or replace every last component. Some of the components can even be hand-built in the garage or machine tool shop. Try to find that level of performance or serviceability in modern power drills.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I have disposed of tons of monitors over the years, all with WEEE-compliant disposal agents.
One of them told me that they get paid a pound (British) each to take them to Heathrow. They are loaded on a plane. A guy from a company in India / Asia signs them off and gives them the money. He then pays to ship them out to Asia.
The ONLY way that can be profitable, is for them to be landfilled in a country that doesn't care about what they are landfilling.
On my end, I have all the paperwork, so I have disposed of them "ethically". So has the guy with the van that he takes to Heathrow loaded with monitors every week. And he takes any boxes of cables, which he tells me the copper - melted down - pays for his fuel. Otherwise he wouldn't make profit himself.
I imagine your goodwill store are doing the same, they just don't know it.
Honestly - what possible use is an old, broken CRT monitor? None. That's why we've been throwing them away for decades rather than try to repair them. Even if you look into what's in them, there are no profitable parts you can extract while still being environmentally-friendly (sure, if you don't give a shit about the kids handling rare earth metals to get at tiny slivers of precious metals, then it all "works").
You've been fed a line. But for the last 15 years I've not heard anything but the same thing from all the different people who come to collect our e-waste, all of whom sign off, all of whom get their thing signed-off, but nobody knows what happens to the end product as it goes abroad (at HUGE expense if you consider cargo rates and handling on tons of monitors).
There are numerous studies that put GPS trackers in e-waste. Almost without exception they end up abroad and in landfill.
Whether it's you, the goodwill store, Dell, their disposal company, or the people they use doing that "knowingly" it's almost impossible to tell. But you're aren't doing shit for the planet, I assure you.
Why does you paying them make them more honest?
I don't, nor did I say so. Please read my post again.
How much fuel do you burn driving there and back?
As much as I would taking the monitor to any other place that would have taken them. I try to do electronics in a batch. But honestly you are missing the point entirely by saying anything about fuel use, which is a totally different vector than recycling. I don't care how much fuel I burn for anything (except of course for the cost of it which is real).
Like most recycling, this seems to be more about "feeling good" rather than actually helping the environment.
No it's exactly unlike feeling good. I take it to a place I think offers the greatest percentage of the monitor no ending up in a river somewhere which is good for no-one.
Except for all the resources that went into building the warehouse.
Irrelevant comment; see my comment re: fuel. Resources do not matter as much as residual pollution does.
Do you know how much CO2 is generated to make concrete?
Again, not relevant since CO2 is not pollution and the argument against CO2 is a totally different one than against real pollution. Nature loves and uses CO2 (do you even know how plants live???)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, so that OP's idea won't work, although it was creative.
How about a similar solution.
Encase the offending components in something (glass?) and position that in such a way that it gets folded into a subduction zone. Then it gets melted into the earth - kind of like where it came from anyway.
Would something like that work ?
I just put mine in a cardboard box with a random address on it and taped up to look like it's brand new, valuable and awaiting pickup by a courier or freight company -- and then leave it on the street outside my house.
Within hours -- it's gone.
Then it's the thief's problem :-)
I'm a professional CRT recycler with experience with the companies in the article. The leaded silicate in CRT glass can actually be valuable as a fluxing agent. It's basically the same as anglesite, the leaded quartz that's mined worldwide. But because of e-waste alarmism (e.g. original article said they were full of "toxic gases", still says the CRTs "explode"), the primary copper and lead smelting industries stopped accepting the material. I personally managed several hundred tons of cullet from one on the companies in the article, but the smelter didn't like the regulators and environmentalists poking around, or the red tape. So they went back to mining lead and silica from the ground. Here's an article I wrote about the "no good deed goes unpunished" aspects of CRT glass recycling. resource-recycling.com/pdfs/Ingenthron0316e.pdf Previously I wrote one - also published in Motherboard - about how Asian refurbishers stopped buying CRTs from America for the same reason (they were being cast as "primitive wire burners). motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/26/e-waste-recycling-exports-are-good
A good rule of thumb is that the worst forms of recycling are better for the environment than the best forms of hard rock metal mining. But "waste" policy says the opposite, waste is a "liability" for the consuming industry, mined material is subsidized.
Gently reply
In the EU, the vendors, merchants, and manufacturers are required by law to take that stuff back and give proof of proper professional recycling. Any store that sells such devices is required to take any device (no matter if it was bought there or not) back for recycling, no questions asked and no fees allowed. Sure, cost of new devices might increase a bit, but not as much given that there is still plenty of competition. It compels manufacturers also to design and build devices in such a way that they are easy and cheap to recycle. Plus, in the EU such devices have a minimum of 2 years manufacturer warranty....unlike the US where stuff is made only as good as necessary to circumvent lemon laws.
Vitrification is pretty trivial(indeed, the material being not-recycled here is leaded glass already); getting something folded into the earth's mantle, not so much.
Where any normal person is perfectly happy to have it rest forever.
News flash. Nothing in the deepest ocean trenches has any effect on the human food chain.
You might not think so, because elemental lead is not water-soluble. However compounds of lead like hydroxides or carbonates are soluble and can form from elemental lead by contact with water, e.g., 2Pb + O2 + 2H2O -> 2 Pb(OH)2.
This is why it's perfectly safe to drink wine from leaded crystal wine glasses, but a bad idea to store wine in a leaded crystal decanter.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My city does this every few years, and they still charge $20 for 28" and down, $35 for over. I got rid of the last one we had -- a color-corrected display my son had used for graphics design -- at one of their events maybe five years ago. It was an awesome sort of sight seeing all the pallets full of old TVs and monitors. If you had one of those 1960s fine-wood consoles they sent you to a special line -- there is apparently a market for those with the old electronics and display replaced with new.
Similar to the End of Life Vehicles Directive in the EU, Similar to the German End-of-Life Vehicles Act of 2002 (extended from a similar law in 1997). Manufacturers are responsible for recycling their vehicle at the vehicles end of life, this means manufacturers design their cars to be more easily recycled and means any overhead costs are built into the cost of the car up-front. There is no good reason that this shouldn't be the case for any larger or common products, why should the cost of recycling be deferred until the product has reached end of life, no consumer will pay more money to have their product recycled *after* it is useless.
Glass is water-soluble. That's why supply houses sell distilled water in plastic jugs. http://www.chemworld.com/ChemW...
That's why the F.D.A. recommends against using lead glass containers for long-term storage. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02...
There's nothing like the 36" Sony flat screen glass televisions.
186 lbs. of pure video goodness.
I saw a few of those smashed at the dump after the bulldozer went through them. That's about the only thing that could cause any damage to those.
To hold the atmospheric pressure on the flat screen over such a large area, the glass is about an inch thick.
Those things will be around long after cockroaches are extinct.
What do you think the recycler does with them?
I have no way of knowing.
I do know that if I put a monitor in the trash it's going into the landfill with a 100% probability.
If I take it to some some cheap or free place I know there's a pretty good chance it will go into a hellhole in some other country to decay and pollute everything.
If I take it to the place I pay a decent fee there's the highest probability that something as good as possible may be done with it. That probability will never be 100%. But pay paying a reasonable fee I maximize that probability.
Is your answer truly to just give up and not even try because you cannot know?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think it just goes into general revenue here in BC, and then they use the money to bribe the voters for votes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Air freight is expensive. What more likely happened was the agent at Heathrow loaded the monitors into a truck, drove them to a seaport, and transferred them to a ship. From there, whether they were dumped mid-ocean or ended up somewhere in particular is anybody's guess.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
In terms of "melted down for parts" they probably aren't worth much, but how about the actual capacitors etc when removed and re-used. Old CRT's had some badass (and deadly) capacitors. I've been tempted to see about harvesting them for other purposes, except the badass part means that even years after the last use they can zap you but good.
This is why I am not worried about landfills.
Eventually(Sometime in the next 20 years), there will be technology to Mine landfills.
Every scrap of copper, aluminium and rare metals will be extracted from the waste piles. The rest will be turned into energy.
Someone will come up with technology to make it profitable.
I am certain of it.
First of all, normal glass does have lots of ionic impurities. This lowers the melting temperature to something affordable. Even normal lab glass is this way, though less so and with different impurities. The pure stuff is called "fused silica". Fused silica is really expensive. It's normally used for IR and UV optical stuff, gravity wave detectors, cruciables, and... pretty much nothing else.
Even ignoring the impurities, glass itself is sort of ionic. In a lab, you can make it hydrophobic or hydrophilic by stripping off some silicon or oxygen atoms with an acid or base. Strong bases will noticably eat away at glass. Water itself is not perfectly covalent; there is a Kw (K sub w) constant for the dissociation of water. It is from this that the pH and pOH of pure water is about 7. Both pH and pOH rise with temperature because Kw rises with temperature. This could be interpreted as water becoming "more base" and "more acid" at the same time as the temperature goes up. Now remember that strong bases noticably eat away at glass. Water isn't sitting there calmly; it is a more dynamic system of both acid and base in balance. Water will thus slowly pick atoms off the surface of the glass.
Bullshit. MIT tracking study found only 14% of CRTs were exported, and most of those were found in reuse operations. And they didn't even track any large CRT TVs (only small monitors) which haven't had much of an export market for a decade. The NGOs who made up this story about "primitive" tech sector have a uniqure role, raising millions with pictures of kids at foreign dumps, but not actually sharing a single penny with the people in the photos - instead driving it into these warehouses. I'm a lifelong environmentalist, but the NGO's "CRT e-waste policy" was a sever case of malpractice, planned obsolescence, and racial profiling.
Gently reply
"We know that the Russians still do nuclear tests"
LOL How exactly do you "KNOW" that? Is this the latest conspiracy theory from nutty left-leaning websites intent on pushing the "evil Russians" narrative?
The Russians did their last tests in the late 1980s. The USA and USSR signed the "Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" circa 1990. There has been no nuclear testing by either country since then, even underground. A nuclear explosion isn't something you can do secretly. There is a seismographic monitoring network that can pick up the signature from 1000s of km away and narrow down the location to within about 50 km.
Maybe you're confusing Russia with North Korea?