HP's CARTRIDGE RECYLCING FACILITY……..LIVE VIDEO !!!

[Anonymous]

How HP does green: Recycling facility tour
CLICK IN THIS LINK BELOW TO SEE THE VIDEO
http://h30415.www3.hp.com/?rf=sitemap&fr_story=fe4665c5f7afced612096616db9c128d2bdd7ab2&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
In
the new millennium, we hear all about advancing science while moving
forward responsibly. And why shouldn’t we try to protect the
environment we live in as we try to make are lives better, easier?This
is where the green movement has stepped in: responsible people (and
companies) trying to reduce their impact, reuse their tools and recycle
their waste.  Last week, Hewlett Packard (HP) was kind enough to give
us a behind-the-scenes peek into their green effort with a tour of one
of two inkjet cartridge recycling plants they run as of this writing.

For
those readers who may be new to the HP green scene, I want to give a
quick overview because in some ways HP has been ahead of the pack when
it comes to environmental awareness. They set into place their Global
Citizenship objective in the 1950’s and hired their first environmental
control coordinator in 1970.

Throughout the 70’s, HP put
together environmental policy but in the 1980’s they turned policy into
reality with their first recycling programs.Computer products and
hardware were the first recycling programs in 1987 followed by the
founding of the HP Plant Partners Program in 1991.  It was in 1991 that
HP first started recycling toner cartridges; they added inkjet
cartridges in 1997.   Twenty years after they started their first
recycling programs, HP announced that they had recycled one billion
pounds of computing hardware and cartridges.  And here’s the kicker:
the company has set goals to recycle another billion pounds of material
by the year 2010.

Which is why I was excited to see the
recycling plant in action; after all it is an important cog in the HP
Closed Loop System for Plastics Recycling.I’m sure you are wondering
what the HP Closed Loop System for Plastic Recycling is and it can be
complicated to explain.  I’ll try my best to break it down simply.The
closed loop starts with customers – maybe you, perhaps – sending in
their original HP inkjet cartridges for recycling through HP’s Planet
Partners Program.  All of the inkjet cartridges are sent to one of two
HP recycling facilities: the Nashville location I visited recently and
another plant in Germany.   At these facilities, the products are
stripped and shredded and sent to the next stop in the closed loop
circuit.
That next stop happens to be a plant in Canada where the
refined recycled material (clean PET shreds) are mixed with recycled
plastic bottle resin and unnamed chemicals in a process called
compounding.

After compounding, the material is ready to be made
into cartridges and is sent to one of four HP cartridge manufacturing
plants internationally: Ireland, Asia Pacific, Puerto Rico and North
America.And from there, the new cartridges – made from the recycled old
cartridges – are shipped to stores and purchased by customers.  The
chart below provided by HP may help explain this process better than I
did.Now that you may have a grasp on the overall HP Closed Loop
process, we can focus on how the Nashville facility fits into this
picture.And that’s hard to do at first because the Nashville facility
itself is unremarkable from the outside; it looks like any other
warehouse you might pass by on the interstate or back road.  Looks can
be deceiving though; it was nothing like I imaged a factory would
be.For one thing, the facility was clean, relatively clutter free and
spacious.  HP added several natural lighting panels to the ceiling in
addition to typical fluorescent lighting which not only cuts back on
energy bills but probably boosts morale.  I know how much I loathe
working in florescent lighting all day!

You can see the natural lighting panels above the machines
The
factory is divided into two huge rooms.  The first room we toured was
where the cartridges are brought in and sorted through by employees. 
We didn’t see much of this area of the plant in use but our tour guides
explained this was the first stage of sorting.

There are several
levels of sorting because the facility only recycles original HP inkjet
cartridges but receives plenty of other materials on a daily basis.
That list includes original HP toner cartridges (sent to the recycling
facility in Virginia), remanufactured HP inkjet or toner cartridges,
other branded cartridges and complete random items (including cell
phones, batteries and Barbie dolls to name a few).

You may
wonder why they won’t recycle remanufactured HP inkjet cartridges. 
HP’s official line is they can’t recycle cartridges handled by a third
party due to what may or may not be present in the cartridges.

Once
cartridges have been sorted by employees, they are sorted by machines
in several ways.  First, cartridges sent in individual envelopes are
removed from their packaging using a large machine that pulls the paper
from the body of the cartridge.After cartridges are removed from their
packaging, they are sorted into cartridge families using an x-ray
machine.  Fun fact: HP got the idea for this machine from a similar one
used to make sure there are no bones left in your boneless chicken. 
Fun, right?

Cartridge families sorted, preshredding
The
cartridge families then head to the shredder (not a pleasant fate, but
keep the end goal in mind).  The shredded cartridges, combined with the
sort manufacturing scrap brought to the plant, next has to pass the
sink or float test.

Cartridges on the way up, shredded materials on the way down
Inside
the cartridges, there is foam (think carpet padding consistency) and
residual ink.  The shredded material is sprayed with water and sorted
so that just the plastic and metal pieces move forward and the foam is
sorted out.

Sorted foam from inside cartridges
From
there, the machines pull out the precious metal with magnets.  This
metal will also be recycled but at a different location.  The plastic
shreds are ready to be refined and compounded at this point and are
shipped off to the next location.

Sorted unrefined plastic shreds
But
here’s the cool part – those plastic shreds you see in the above
pictures will be made into new cartridges – the HP 60 cartridge family
has 60% recycled materials in each individual cartridges.   And after
you done using the cartridge made from recycled materials it can be
sent back to the Nashville factory to enter the closed loop system once
again.What really hit home with me about the HP Closed Loop System is
that it doesn’t actually make the company any money.  Recycling the
cartridges is free for customers and the process is run through the
Imaging and Printing Group.Recycling inkjet cartridges isn’t the only
green project HP is working on either!  Don’t worry, faithful readers,
PrinterComparison.com will follow up with information about other green
initiatives that HP and other manufacturers are working on in the
coming weeks.Find out more info on HP’s Eco Solutions and Global
Citizenship projects on their site.  Want to see the tour yourself?
Check out the HP video tour of the Nashville recycling facility.

[Author]

March 25, 2009 at 3:33 PM