Backbone Magazine
http://www.backbonemag.com/
Published: Wednesday, May 5, 2008
By Ian Harvey
Saving the world, one computer at a time
Barrie, Ontario – Alfred Hambsch shuffles quickly through his sprawling 30,000-square-foot electronics recycling facility, rattling a narrative explanation of the robust machinery towering above as it greedily crushes circuit boards, plastic, wiring and other technology cast-offs.
“This one,” he yells in his German-accented English over the noise of the hammer mill, “is breaking apart the circuit boards. And here is the centrifuge, which has a blade in it to strip apart the metal from the plastic.
“And here,” stopping for breath at the foot of a five-storey bright green behemoth of silver pipes and tanks, “is where we make the diesel from the plastic.”
It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it, and Hambsch is no shrinking violet in the world of e-waste. Larger than life, he’s a man on a mission, wearing his passion for his business—the quest to save the planet from itself—on his sleeve.
“My goal,” he said, throwing his arms up, hands open to indicate the piles of discarded computers, televisions and other electronics piled up around him, “is for zero landfill. This is a resource. Why mine it from the ground when you can recover it here?”
Indeed, waste not, want not, or in Hambsch’s case, e-waste not, want not. In all this garbage is a bounty of gold, silver, lead, copper and aluminum.
Hambsch has also designed and built a modern day Alchemist’s Stone, turning a sand-like stream of ground mixed plastic, which would otherwise go to landfill, into black gold—diesel fuel—at the rate of 300 litres an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“That’s just a start,” he smiles, his stout barrel-chest filling with pride. “What I want and what we think we can get is 500 litres an hour. I use it to drive my generators to create electricity to run the plant and run the turbines which heat the plastic as part of the process to make diesel oil. We want to be self-sufficient.”
Indeed, Environment Canada numbers show we dumped 140,000 tonnes of e-waste between 2004 and 2005, and it expects that to triple by 2011. Dealing with that old technology will likely require some new technology.
Ironically, not enough garbage
There’s no shortage of plants. Hambsch’s Barrie Metals Group also owns General Electric and Electronics Processing (GEEP), a 30-acre facility an hour north of Toronto.
Other Canadian e-waste recyclers include Sims (www.sims-group.com) in Brampton, Ont., ecycle (www.ecyclesolutions.com) out of Airdrie, Alta., FCM (www.fcmrecycling.com) out of Montreal, Teck Cominco (www.tcer.ca) in Trail, B.C., Technotrash Alberta (www.technotrash.ca) in Calgary, Rider Ecosys (www.ecosys.ca) in Mississauga, Ont., and MaSer Canada in Barrie (www.masercorp.com). Overall, there are 18 such e-waste recycling plants globally.
All are waiting anxiously for jurisdictions across North America to ban e-waste from landfills, since their operations need a steady stream of waste to be profitable. “Right now I have about 60 people working one shift (in Barrie), but I’d like to have two shifts running,” Hambsch said. “In Edmonton, where they have the landfill legislation, we have no problems with feedstock. Here I can’t get enough until they pass the legislation.”
A millwright by trade, Hambsch came to Canada from his native Germany in 1975. Typical of the European trades-turned-entrepreneur class, he saw a land of opportunity and, by 1985, had purchased salvage company Barrie Metal Group. While commodity prices remained low until the last few years, he also knew there would be a need to develop a better way to recycle the growing stream of electronics.
He’s a hands-on guy who designed the machinery and processes he is using in Canada and in plants in Durham, N.C., Sacramento, Calif., and, soon, Dallas.
Like the other plants, GEEP is a factory in reverse: dismantling and separating components instead of assembling them. Because it is so labour intensive, some processes—like cutting up monitors to separate the glass—are money-losing propositions, although offset by the $700 per tonne tipping fees the plants receive.
These are noisy, busy places: components are crushed and then hand sorted into essential materials, plastics and metals. In the second stage the components are further pummeled until they are separated into metals and plastics.
At GEEP the third stage is a centrifuge, which delaminates any remaining plastic from metal. The final products are a granular pile of mixed metals, which are then shipped to a smelter for recovery, and a powdery almost sand-like mixture of hard plastics, which are fed into a new nano processor to rearrange their essential hydrocarbons into diesel fuel.
It’s the latter process which, according to Hambsch, is exclusively his and separates his operations from the competition.
Waiting on legislators
In the meantime, he’s anxiously awaiting Ontario’s expected e-waste legislation to kick-start the incoming stream of scrap electronics.
The first step in that process is set for March 31 when Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO), a non-crown corporation set up to find alternatives to sending otherwise recyclable garbage to provincial landfills, hands in a report to the province’s Minister of the Environment. It’s expected to form the basis of legislation by the fall.
Four years in the making, the report suggests an approach modeled on other successful programs in Europe. The key to the proposed program is a levy on electronics paid by the consumer, she said, which in turn would generate the cash to pay for the collection and recycling of those products when they’re junked.
The same retail sales channels that delivered the items to customers would work in reverse to collect them, she said. “They would collect the old items when they deliver the new ones, warehouse them on pallets and then the items would be picked up and taken to the recycling plants. This would be paid from the levies. Consumers could also take their computers to, say, second-hand stores, Goodwill or the Salvation Army thrift stores and drop them off. They, too, would be paid.”
Canada is following the lead of Europe, which passed its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive in 2003 to manage end-of-life-cycle disposal. Coupled with 2006 legislation called Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS), it also restricts the use of six toxins in manufacturing—lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE)—and diverts e-waste to recycling.
In Canada, 4,750 tonnes of lead, 4.5 tonnes of cadmium and 1.1 tonnes of mercury go into landfills annually, based on 2004 Environment Canada estimates. These toxic substances have been linked to kidney damage and neurological impairment.
Private-sector action
Spurred on by Europe, North American governments and technology companies long ago realized they’d better get with the program. Most major tech manufacturers now have fee-based disposal programs for corporate customers and consumer incentives for recycling obsolete equipment. “We have to be part of the solution,” said Frances Edmonds, Hewlett-Packard Canada’s director of environmental programs. HP recycled 250 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges globally last year, 50 per cent more than in 2006. “This is an issue the IT industry—anyone in electronics—needs to face head on.”
The vehicle the industry created to do that is Electronic Products Stewardship Canada (EPSC), a consortium of computer makers, electronics importers, assemblers and retailers that has been working with provincial environment ministries to develop a best practices plan for the proper disposal of electronic waste.
“Canada should be very proud,” said Jay Illingworth, director of EPSC. “We were not the first moving forward on this but we’ve worked with all four programs in place now and there’s a program going forward in Ontario.”
The industry stakeholders have recognized the role they must play, he said, adding the template adopted under the WEEE recycling models will likely include items like tires, car batteries and other manufactured goods.
Plants like GEEP, Sims and others large-scale multinational operations are critical to the recycling program, Illingworth said, but these need to be large centres running at capacity to be economically viable. That mandates trucking or shipping materials via rail, despite the obvious carbon footprint that creates.
“Certainly we’re lucky in Canada in that we have the capacity for the recycling we’ll need in many places and we have smelters for lead and other metals,” Illingworth said. “But there’s a question about whether the Atlantic provinces will be able to achieve the economies of scale needed to make recycling plants economical. Also, there are some questions around toxic materials like mercury and other materials in batteries which we’ll need to work out.”
Cross Canada update
Asking consumers to pay for recycling through an upfront levy won’t induce sticker shock, according to the authors of a Waste Diversion Ontario plan, as prices for electronics continue to drop and the additional cost will simply be folded into the shelf price.
And it’s a necessary evil; while corporate Canada has adjusted to the reality of paying to dispose of its electronics, funding responsible disposal of obsolete technology from consumers will require a legislated tax or levy.
Ontario is expected to table legislation this fall to put levies on new computers and peripherals. It joins British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, which have enacted e-waste legislation effectively banning electronic trash from landfills. Quebec and Manitoba are well along in developing programs with only New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador still mulling their best course of action, given the lack of proximity to recycling plants.
Ontario’s program, which will be the biggest in Canada, is projected to cost about $47 million in the first year with $8.8 million in start-up administration costs and $2.6 million for promotion and audit. Those expenses will be offset by the levies: for desktops, $12.36 each; laptops, $1.97; peripherals, $0.35; monitors, $10.99; TVs, $9.21; and printers, $4.64.
