This whopping 47 pallets of stuff included 13 pallets (over 11,000 pounds) of televisions, 8 pallets of appliances and 7 pallets of monitors. Where did it all go? To WeRecycle in Mount Vernon - a high-tech, automated facility that processes the electronics for recycling. Here's some photos and facts from my tour.
First, the material goes to their nearby facility for manual breakdown, where the electronics are partially dismantled by hand to make the next step more efficient. For example, plastic and wooden casings are removed from televisions. Next, the material is sent to their newly renovated and heavily automated facility employing state-of-the-art processing technology. The goal of the operation is maximize the value of scrap electronics. On an average day, the facility processes 300 pallets of electronics and turns them into organized boxes of commodities, ready to be recycled. With their new expansion, there are 2 shifts running throughout the day, which maximizes productivity in this busy place. The next phase of the expansion will allow 3 continuous shifts to run each day, for a maximum of 24 hours of operation.
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| Blower fans push the light plastics and allow the heavy plastics to drop below. |
And where do they go? Metals are sold to a local scrap yard, and from there sent to mills, recyclers and smelters. The plastics are exported for processing, separated by being either light or dark/mixed resin plastic. The fragments are processed by a smelter in Europe. More can be read about their process here.
The standards used by WeRecycle are stringent - they're one of the very few E-Stewards certified handlers in the Northeast. This certification prohibits the export of toxic e-waste to developing nations, as many rich industrialized nations have been doing in recent years. This certification came from the 1989 Basel Convention, " a United Nations treaty which was designed to prevent the global dumping of toxic waste on developing countries from more developed countries." Because the US is the only developed country that has failed to ratify the Basel Convention, it's important that we make sure we know where electronics we recycle are actually going. Again, from the e-Stewards website, "Without appropriate national and international legislation or enforcement in place in many regions, it is unfortunately left up to individual citizens, corporations, universities, cities – all of us – to figure out how to prevent the toxic materials in electronics from continuing to cause long term harm to human health and the environment, particularly in countries with developing economies."
Make sure to ask questions when you drop off your unwanted/not working electronics, and always try to reuse first. For a list of where to reuse and recycle electronics in the Hudson Valley, please see http://www.zerotogo.org/p/reduce-reuse-recycle.html.
