HP START PILOT PROGRAM TO COLLECT EMPTIES IN CANADA(VIDEO)

[Anonymous]

http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/cars-transportation/recycle-printer-cartridges-460410
HP START PILOT PROGRAM TO COLLECT EMPTIES
IN CANADA
Check out HP and the Lavergne
Group’s advanced processing technology, which is saving money and
resource use.

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LIVE VIDEO MUST SEE !!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlAISgY1bAM
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MONTREAL — Recycling isn’t usually much fun to watch. Those
blue bins aren’t too animated. And don’t we all suspect that as soon as
the truck turns the corner it all gets thrown in the landfill anyway?
That has actually happened in some places when the value of recycled
material went into the toilet.

In some cases, we’re going
backwards in recycling. Take just the case of plastic water bottles. We
produce 29 billion of them a year, and only 30 percent get recycled,
which means an escalating amount of waste (expressed in millions of
tons).

But plastic water bottles are eminently recyclable, and
earlier this week, in Montreal, I saw them put to good use.
Hewlett-Packard, which makes the printer cartridges we all pay dearly
for, isn’t content to let them go to landfills. These days, they’re
being dismantled instead of shredded — a much cleaner process.

The
company started recycling cartridges in 1991 (taking back more than 300
million from inkjet and laser printers), and is getting much better at
figuring out how to reuse the plastic. Today, a pilot project in a
French-Canadian factory is no longer shredding the cartridges (a process
that leaves a contaminated mix of plastic, metal and paper), it’s
dismantling them for 50 percent greater yields in recovered plastic.
Here’s how it works, according to HP’s Dean Miller:You can send your
cartridges back to their maker in a number of ways (there are programs
in 50 countries) and the options include mailing them back in pre-paid
envelopes and returning them for credit to Staples stores. Either way,
they end up at industrial facilities like the one I visited in Montreal.

But
they don’t get crushed. In 2005, after five years of work, HP developed
a closed-loop system for recycling printer cartridges that, at the
Lavergne Group facility I visited alone, handles a million pounds of
plastic every month. Closed loop means the plastic lives again as new
cartridges. HP has made more than 500 million printer-ready cartridges
through the closed-loop process since 2005.

The closed-loop
process is like something out of the movie Brazil — a combination of
retro mechanical and high tech. Dismantling (especially in this pilot
scale) is much slower than crushing cartridges, of course. The
dismantler handles 15 cartridge a minute, and the shredder thousands per
hour. But the result is much cleaner: The robot arms scrape off the
label, lop off the plastic lid, remove the electronic guts and the foam
pad, then toss the remaining plastic bucket into a hopper.

Once
shredded, the cartridge material is mixed with 75 to 80 percent plastic
bottle waste and then (they wouldn’t let us see this part) combined with
special chemical additives to make it strong and pliable — in effect,
basically the same as virgin plastic again.Until recently, the process
handled only easy-to-recycle PET plastic, but last year polypropylene
(PP) was added and almost two million cartridges with PP have been
processed.After having received some flak on the issue, HP has also
considerably reduced the packaging going into its ink cartridges.
There’s no U.S. law mandating that kind of waste reduction, but
so-called Green Dot laws in Europe and Asia give impetus to that kind of
reform. Green Dot makes manufacturers responsible for their packaging,
which in effect gives them huge motivation to reduce the amount they
include with products. Buy toothpaste in the U.S. and it comes in the
box; buy the identical brand in Europe and it stands on its cap.

Strong
corporate lobbies discourage the European approach here, but on March
25 Maine became the first state in the U.S. to enact an extended
producer responsibility (EPR) law. And some 19 states have rules
requiring takeback of electronic equipment. A national law would tie all
of this together, and it will be a brave legislator who shepherds a
bill through to passage.

As a car writer, I’m always looking for
an auto angle, and I found it in a Lavergne Group office displaying a
number of auto parts, including a taillight assembly. They’re all made
from plastic recycled in the plant. Lavergne has a contract with Ford to
provide plastic for Econoline van front ends, and because of the strong
European end-of-life vehicle laws it’s looking at setting up a branch
to serve carmakers in Germany.Knowing about all this should stay your
hand when hit by the impulse to throw away that spent printer cartridge.
Not only is there money in it (get thee to the nearest Staples story)
but properly recycled it will again dispense ink.

[Author]

April 26, 2010 at 11:22 AM