What happens to old CRT monitors?

Robert Macy Inscribed thus:

Yes very painful...

Actually a guy who used to work at the crushing mill lives round the corner from me. He got trapped by one of the three crusher balls and lost both his legs.

Horrible. My apologies.

There's a garden near here which has an imitation Stonehenge made of mainframe cases

True about the gold, and the monitors going overseas for "recycling"

When a private school near where I used to live replaced its computers they piled the old ones up in the garden and had a bonfire. You could smell it for miles.

Do NOT try this at home

Pretty much everything can be salvage from most electronics, if you do it correctly.

Plastic can be reground and reused So can glass Some chips and expensive components are extracted and reused Components containing high amounts of precious metals or pure metals are removed for separate recycling Remaining boards and components can usually be ground up to remove remaining metals through various processes Substrate material left after extracting the metals can be remade into all sorts of stuff

You'd think that, given the high prices of gold and copper, it would be profitable to recycle monitors.

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in news:hnvt6m$thc$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

Labor cost is probably the reason.

Well, we've seen a lot of electronic equipment shipped off to third-world countries for recycling.

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in news:hnvv60$bdd$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

yes,but then you add handling and shipping costs....

Heh,some folks would bitch about us exporting our pollution and wastes to poor nations...

my county has a recycle program for used electronics;

Hi!

They can be recycled.

Hewlett Packard once had a section of their web site devoted to a tour of their recycling facility. In it, they showed people dismantling laptops and other things.

The details are fuzzy in my memory, but they shredded and ground circuit boards (with components) into a fine substance that was screened to split it out. Plastics were smelted. I don't know what happened to CRT and other glass.

William

Hi!

I was hoping for a shiny new flat panel, ya know?

I didn't sleep well and all I got was a crick in my neck and a headache.

William

Robert Macy Inscribed thus:

No apology needed. The guy freely admits that it was his own fault for not making sure the machine was isolated and made safe before working on it.

Just to give you an idea of the guys nature, he has a pair of prosthetic legs that are hollow at the bottom, he hides his girlfriend's weed in them. His standing joke is "I've weed in my legs" !

He's a really nice guy.

Lead in the ground is not a problem (I mean, that's where is comes from!) It is however a problem in waterways. I was advised of this whilst discussing the amount of lead I was blasting into the countryside last time I went shooting (shotgun/clays).

They get sent to CRT Heaven (seriously).

The recycling machinery biz is big biz.

There are several videos on YouTube showing the process:

Hmmm... my e-Waste photos are getting a bit old:

Our government is here to help:

In article , Jeff Liebermann writes

Thanks Jeff. The CRT Angel (self-contained CRT recycling unit) was especially interesting.

This is how to deal with a balky PC:

Impressive!

Hang on there are some metal bits left over, this is how to deal with them

I think this one is running a bit better

California spent a bundle of the smoking tax money on commercials instead of the health care they promised the money would be spent on. One of the funnier ones asked the tobacco companies how they covered up evidence of wrong doing. "You know, those office shredders just aren't up to the task of shredding thousands of documents."

Then proceeded to throw laptops, PC desk tops and finally a complete 4-drawer filing cabinet through truck mounted wood chipper.

Was quite the fun thing to watch even if it was fake. ;-)

Jeff

About 20 years ago, the landlord in my office building was running an office cleaning company[1] with a paper shredder sideline. The paper shredder was about the size of a large dumpster. Every day, a pickup truck load of paper would arrive and get fed to the hungry monster, producing mountains of confetti and dust. Dust and debris would also fall from the ceiling as my office shook and rattled from the vibrations. This went on for about 6 months until someone accidentally fed it the hand truck used to load the paper. I would normally expect the shredder to just stop or to disassemble itself, but that's not what happened. The interlocking teeth froze, the overload switch failed, which caused the huge motor to rip away from its mountings, smash through the side of the shredder, smash through a decorative wood wall, and bounce off the landlords wife's car. That was followed by a dumpster full of paper confetti initially all over the parking lot, and later all over the offices, nearby roadway, neighbors apartments, etc. It took about 3 full days for a crew to clean up the mess. Sorry, but I was gone and didn't take any photos. A few weeks later, the landlord sold the shredding business to someone else, who still run it out of an industrial park today.

Domestic CRTs get put in wheelie bin and go to landfill.

Same as all those ECO friendly bulbs that contain mercury.

OK a few do get taken to the tip. CRTs/electronics go in a container. They have a sealed "coffin" with a tube sized airlock for tubes. The last time I took some they seemed quite surprised, I think most people just break them to fit the wheelie bin. I'm about to see they how get on with 3 ECO bulbs. I've got 2 5ft tubes, a car battery, 10L engine oil, 3 oil filters, 2 14" CRTs, 1L brake fluid to go too, bet I have to sign for every item in triplicate due to toxic nature of them.

Industry has larger batch volume, hard to hide, more likely to be traced to source and the penalties make it worth doing the right thing with them.