Recycle Old Hardware the 'Green' Way

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For system builders, knowing how to properly recycle or dispose of hardware systems is becoming as important as knowing how to purchase them. There are an estimated 750+ million PCs in use worldwide. With the useful life of a PC no more than five years, all those machines, plus the ones that replace them, will eventually become trash—a lot of trash.

Unwanted computers are an environmental problem. Computer components contain heavy metals, including lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium. Without recycling, these toxic metals can accumulate in landfills and pollute nearby drinking water.

Doing your part is more than a "feel good" issue. Increasingly, requests for quotations from large buyers are concerned not only with acquisition, but also with subsequent disposition. Dell, for example, recently announced it would recycle all its computers for free. Similarly, Apple has said it will offer free recycling with Mac purchases.

The time may soon arrive when system builders will need to line up their disposal chain, just as they now must line up a supply chain. If you do business in the U.S. states of California, Maine, Maryland, or Washington, that time has already arrived. These states have enacted strict laws regarding electronics recycling.

Even if you're not bound by the law (yet), you probably have e-scrap you want to clear out of the shop, or you may wish to offer your customers an environmentally-friendly way to haul away their old systems. But be aware that if you're thinking of making decent money off your scrap, don't count on it. Businesses that regularly dump 20-ton shipping containers filled with the stuff can make a small profit—and they're lucky to get $60 a ton. Most firms must hire someone to take the stuff away.

Similarly, it's probably too soon to consider making PC recycling your main business. The field is going through a rapid consolidation, according to David Daoud, a market analyst at research firm. Recyclers must be able to guarantee service, including compliance with all applicable environmental laws, and must carry loads of liability insurance. That implies large-scale operations with facilities around the globe—no place for a small business like a system builder.

That said, recycling old PCs should be a part of every system builder's business. You'll help customers comply with applicable laws. And you'll be a good citizen of Planet Earth.

The Lowdown on Recycling and Disposing of Old Components

So what can be recycled? Here are pointers on what to do—and where to go—with common PC components when they're ready to be recycled or otherwise disposed:

* CRT Monitors: Basically, a CRT needs to be recycled rather than discarded. Recycling a CRT involves dismantling it with special equipment that is beyond the reach of most system builders.

A typical cathode ray tube contains more than eight pounds of toxic lead. As long as the CRT is sealed and intact, the lead is not an issue. But if you put a monitor on the street to be collected with the garbage, it will be trucked to a landfill, dumped on the ground, and run over with a bulldozer, releasing the lead. For this reason, many municipal garbage systems will not accept CRT monitors.

As of now, several state recycling laws principally concern CRTs. California, for instance, requires CRT buyers to pay a disposal fee up front, which is used to subsidize collection and recycling. Consumers are expected to turn over their old CRTs to recyclers or municipal collectors. Similarly, the laws in Maine and Maryland charge vendors for items collected by local governments. The Washington State law requires vendors to set up take-back programs.

If you offer to remove customers' old monitors, find recyclers to handle the chore for you. To do so, follow the steps in the "Working with Earth 911" section below.

* Circuit Boards: There's gold in that thar scrap—but getting the gold has meant, in some cases, sending the scrap to Third World backwaters. There, child labor is used to pry apart the components and the leftovers are typically tossed into landfill, which can pollute the groundwater. (For more on this problem, see The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa from the Basel Action Network.)

If you are handling disposal for a third party, you may be called on to produce certificates proving the scrap was disposed of properly, even if it went overseas, and that child labor wasn't involved. I provide a resource on finding who in your area recycles circuit boards below.

* Batteries: More than 350 million rechargeable batteries are sold in the U.S. yearly, and these batteries contain heavy metals, especially lead, cadmium, and mercury. These toxic metals can end up in the food chain if the batteries are dumped in a landfill or incinerated.

A U.S. federal law known as the Battery Act sets recycling standards for manufacturers and waste handlers. In fact, all nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cad) batteries sold in the U.S. must bear this warning: "Battery Must Be Recycled Or Disposed Of Properly." Similarly, small sealed led-acid (SSLA) batteries must be labeled with the word "RECYCLE."

The Feds probably won't come after you if you throw a rechargeable battery in the trash. But even that need not be an issue anymore, since an organization known as Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp. (RBRC) has set up a network of U.S. collection points at about 30,000 retail outlets (typically electronics stores). To locate a collection point near you, check the RBRC site. The RBRC accepts Ni-Cad, nickel metal hydride (Ni-MH), lithium ion (Li-ion), and SSLA batteries.

Other kinds of batteries usually contain lead. Later in the Recipe, I offer a resource for you to find lead-battery disposal options in your area.

* Ink and Toner Cartridges: Printer cartridges often arrive with some kind of recycling envelope, which lets the user send them back to the manufacturer. Unfortunately, by the time the cartridge is exhausted, that envelope may be lost or misplaced. Using the resource I provide below, you can identify ink and toner cartridge recycling options in your area.

Here's another option: A company called Enviro Solutions offers cash for 225 varieties of laser toner cartridge and about 100 different ink cartridges. Payments for the laser cartridges range from 10 cents to more than $7. For the ink units, payments range from 5 cents to more than $2. Shipping is prepaid, so the effort at least pays for itself.

* Hard Drives: Disposing of hard drives is a special problem, because merely getting rid of them is not enough. You must also erase all their data. Some U.S. states have even passed privacy laws requiring that all hard drives be wiped clean of data before being trashed.

Keep in mind the results of an experiment carried out in 2003 by some MIT students. They acquired nearly 160 used hard drives on eBay, and found that only 12 percent of the drives had been erased. From the remaining 88 percent, they were able to extract some 5,000 credit-card numbers! The students even found financial records from an ATM machine. (For more on this experiment, see the case study, Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization, published by the IEEE Computer Society.)

Unfortunately, getting rid of files on a hard disk using the OS's delete command is not enough. Standard deletion only breaks the link between the OS's allocation table and the disk sectors that hold the files in question. The files are actually still there, and they will remain there until overwritten by new material, which may not happen for a while—or ever, if the drive is being thrown away.

The standard procedure is to overwrite each byte first with a pattern of alternating bits (for instance, 01010101), then with the opposite pattern (in the same example, 10101010), and then a third time with random bits.

Software is available for this task. One example is the Active@KillDesk Hard Drive Eraser from L Soft Technologies. There is a freeware version available on the company's download page.

Some security experts point out that a disk's residual magnetization may still offer useable data, meaning physical destruction of the disk is the only way to ensure data cleansing. Since erasing the drive using software takes time—and a connection to a functional computer—in some situations, you might opt to go straight to physical destruction. Simply drilling some holes in the drive will render it unusable. Thereafter, there is apparently no environmental objection to just tossing it in the trash, since it's just another piece of steel. But since most of the data is still intact on the disk, in theory it could be retrieved by someone who is sufficiently well-equipped.

If you'd like somebody to do this for you, check out the aptly-named Hard Drive Disposal. This company shreds hard drives for a starting price of about $13 a drive. (The price falls to about $7 a drive in large batches.) The platters will be turned into slivers of metal, and you're get a confirmation via e-mail. The company even details the process on its Here's How It Works page.

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