Electronic Recycling Plant in Worcester,MA
May 7, 2008
Andrew McManus, METECH GENERAL MANGER, displays a curcuit board.
The WA Environmental Science classes travelled about a mile from school, just across the start of the Blackstone River along route 146, to the Metech International facility (www.metech-arm.com) in order to learn about the scale (1,000,000 lbs/month) and 3 tier process of recycling electronic waste (reuse, recovery, and reclamation) at Metech.
In 2005, 20-50 million tons of “e-srap” (anything with a chord) were produced in worldwide. In 2007 the US e-scrapped 500 million personal computers. Metech processes electronic equipment for metal reclamation (gold, platinum, silver to copper and aluminum, etc.), while sending off plastics, cardboard, and toxic heavy metals such cadmium and mercury for recycling and/or hazardous waste handling.
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- misc electronic
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- Plastic wrap
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- Shredded Copper.
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- Reclaimed copper
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- Shredded Curcuit Board
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- Silverbars
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- Shredder
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- stereo equipment
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- Lead Acid Battery
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- Magnetic Recycler
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- curcuit board
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- cellphones
For Flow Charts of recycling process click below:
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May 9, 2008 at 2:14 pm
The average American produces about 4.4 pounds (2 kg) of garbage a day, or a total of 29 pounds (13 kg) per week and 1,600 pounds (726 kg) a year. People waste things all the time, like paper towels when they are wiping something up, they would be better using a towel cloth which will reuse over and over again.
A way to make waste work in an optimal sustainable manner, people need to recycle things. Bringing old computers and television to metech international is a huge way of helping the environment. Metech International is the world’s leading service provider to multinational corporations for the management of their electronic materials
May 15, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Metech International Recycling center provides the Massachusetts area a safe and eco-friendly recycling center. Some of the services that the facility offers is Precious Metals Recovery, certifies destruction, date manufacturing, data destruction, remarketing and resale, and material analysis. For over 30, Metech has refurbished precious metals that are used to make some of the electronics recycles. Many different materials have precious metals within them, such as circuit boards, integrated circuits, or fuel cells. Data Destruction is included with the electronics that are destroyed, so that secure and personal information cannot be removed and sold. This provides the ability so that the electronics can be resold or reused with no fear of private information leaking out. After the data is removed, the electronics can be resold to different companies that can, such as DanMar Components. With this service, transportation is required, which Metech can provide with different types of freight transport, or shipping, that is the most cost efficient.
To make this service more efficient, and environmental friendly, there could be some aspects that could be improved upon. An example of this, would be if instead of shipping the parts that cannot be processed at the site, they could build another area where they can be taken apart. This would cut the amount of energy that it requires, so that it would put out less harmful gases and other environmentally unfriendly items.
May 17, 2008 at 4:40 pm
The UN predicts that the amount of e-waste produced worldwide every year will reach 40 million tons soon. That is enough to fill a line of garbage trucks stretching half-way across the world. Some of this waste we produce goes to landfills, where toxic substances it contains such as lead and mercury, flame retardants, and PCBs, can leach into groundwater. Since modern electronics are so complex, they are slow and not easy to disassemble when recycled. That means that more labor, which leads to higher costs, which makes e-scrap recycling less appealing. Despite the less attractive side of e-scrap recycling, companies such as Metech International have recycling plants around the world. A few electronic companies such as Apple, Xerox, HP, and Dell, have established recycling programs for their outdated electronics. But unfortunately not all electronic companies care about recycling there old products, leading to more e-waste to end up in landfills. E-waste accounts for 70 percent of the heavy metals in landfills, including 40 percent of all lead.
If these electronics could be designed for easy dismantling, it could make e-scrap recycling easier and less costly. In fact, records show that if products could be designed this way, recycling could be profitable in poor countries, as well as in the United States and the European nations. Also, if these products didn’t have as many toxins in them, they wouldn’t have to be removed by hand, and could have machines to disassemble them, making the recycling process faster, easier, and cheaper. If electronic companies would become more enthusiastic about recycling, and offer to take away old electronics for free, like some companies already do, people more enthusiastic about recycling. Even if they did not offer this service, we should still recycle all of our old electronics to recycling plants such as Metech, which reuses, recovers, and recycles old electronics.
May 18, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Waste
Waste is any output with no use. There are three different types of waste solid waste, municipal waste, and hazardous waste. Solid waste is typically solid and some liquid but unusable material. Municipal waste is waste from citizens versus industry. It is made up of 38.1% paper, 12.1% yard, 10.9%food, 10.5%plastics, and 7.8% metals. Hazardous waste is highly toxic and requires different treatment than other waste. 57% of the U.S. waste goes to landfills, 28% is recycled, and 15% is incinerated. Ninety-five percent of our solid waste is disposed of in almost-filled landfills and one out of every two of those landfills badly needs repair so it won’t leak. In the U.S. 10 billion pounds of solid waste is emitted each year and 20 tons of carbon dioxide per person a year. The United States generates approximately 208 million tons of municipal solid waste a year. That’s 4.3 pounds per person per day. Also, Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour, and every year around 45,000 tons of plastic waste are dumped into the world’s oceans. One of the results of this is that up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed each year by plastic trash such as fishing gear, six-pack yokes, sandwich bags, and styrofoam cups. And Packaging accounts for 50 percent of all paper produced in North America, 90 percent of all glass, and eleven percent of aluminum.
As you may tell there are many issues with waste but there also are many solutions and alternatives. A popular alternative is making your own compost pile it will save money and the environment. Another is recycling but make sure you recycle the right items. A lot of things people throw away are actually reusable or not finished. So, make sure you used what ever you are throwing away to the fullest. And lastly don’t litter it makes problems for everyone.
May 19, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Waste is the key element to all sustainable systems. Eliminating it is the goal. Metech is an electronic recycling plant. They take other peoples electronic waste and turn it into profit. They take metals such as gold out of computers, TVs and other electronic equipment and make a profit out of it. Gold is used in circuit boards due to the advantage that it never corrodes and how it is a great conductor. Once gold or copper is taken out it can be reused again and again, making it reusable and renewable.
Metech is another good example of a near sustainable system. They use their three steps, as seen in the blog, and try to reuse everything in the piece of electronic equipment. The little bit of waste that they do generate; one could say is in the air particles that get kicked up. Other then that, metals are reused, plastics are recycled, and mother boards are shipped out to be recycled in other places in the world. Through all of the recycling that is done, Metech becomes a sustainable system.
May 20, 2008 at 12:46 am
Dealing with our plastic deluge is one of the most serious environmental hazards humanity will face this century. Our ocean–source of most of the globe’s oxygen and the integral component of our ecosystem–is under threat from plastic waste. In some of the most polluted areas of the Pacific, plastic already outweighs plankton by a factor of six! The vast majority of this ocean pollution–up to 90% of it–comes from litter in urban runoff. The problem is only getting worse. Plastics are the fasted growing component of California’s solid waste stream–production has doubled in the past 20 years and continues to expand. Furthermore, plastics essentially do not biodegrade. When littered, they become a permanent fixture of the environment, leaching toxins as they float through our watershed to the Ocean. Once in the marine environment, they slowly photodegrade into fine particles, polluting the food chain and eventually ending up back in our bodies.
What we need to do is, is be like Switzerland and be openminded to what we do with the waste that we produce. Switzerland is proud of its recycling efforts, and with good reason. Glass and paper are just some of the things the average Swiss refuses to simply throw away. There are bottle banks at every supermarket, with separate slots for clear, green and brown glass. Every town has a free paper collection once a month, and that does not mean just old newspapers; most people recycle everything made of cardboard or paper, from cereal packets to old telephone bills. Then there is green waste. If you have a garden, all the trimmings can be put out on the street (neatly bundled of course) every two weeks, and they will be collected. Aluminium and tin can be taken to local depots, batteries handed over at the supermarket, and old oil or other chemicals deposited at special sites. Plastic PET bottles are the most common drinks containers in Switzerland, and 80% of them are recycled – far higher than the European average of 20 to 40%.