*NEWS*HP MINES FOR GOLD IN TOXIC TRASH

[Anonymous]

HP mines for gold in toxic trash
IN
a vast warehouse in a scorching valley near California’s capital,
Hewlett-Packard workers mine for internet-age gold while diverting
toxic electronic waste from landfills.The company is beefing up
operations in the sleepy California town of Roseville, where its
shredders and chippers rip up everything from mobile telephones to copy
machines and salvage usable scraps.Yellowed newspaper clippings about
e-waste dump sites in rural China are tacked to walls of a workshop
where HP’s goal is to keep discarded technological devices and their
toxic components out of the ground.”It’s a lot like old-fashioned gold
mining,” HP employee Tatyana Kjellberg said.A football field-sized
loading dock is stacked high with computer monitors, printers and
servers collected in just one day.

Those discards of
internet-age life await deconstruction as conveyor belts, rotating
blades and magnets crush and sift endless streams of junk flowing into
huge plastic bins bound for a smelter. HP calls the process product
minimisation. Computer components arrive on the dock and are dismantled
by hand.ThE pieces are sent through a series of machines that break
them down until all that remains are mounds of plastic, steel and
aluminium in small chunks.The US computer maker is revving up a
recycling effort it began with a parts return program in 1987.”We’d
take the usable parts out of products and send them on for reuse, but
then we were left with all these carcasses,” HP recycling operations
manager Ken Turner said. “There was plenty of stuff we just didn’t know
what to do with.”

The company will accept any electronic device
made by any manufacturer. The collection of vintage technology includes
a Sony Mega Watchman, a mobile phone the size of an orthopedic shoe,
and an early Commodore personal computer.An obsolete IBM ThinkPad
bearing a sticker “Roberto’s T30″ awaits reincarnation at the top of a
heap of abandoned machines. Last year, HP globally recycled 74 million
kilograms of e-waste, a mass equivalent to 600 jumbo jets. The
Roseville plant alone accounts for almost 2 million kilograms every
month.”Our recycling program is light years ahead of most companies,”
Mr Turner said. “But we also sell a lot more machines than other
companies.”

HP began in 1938 as a garage workshop in what is now
Silicon Valley. The company grew into a behemoth selling a vast range
of electronic devices worldwide. It reported almost $US92 billion in
revenue last year.As technology increasingly pervades cultures
worldwide, and product lifecycles shorten, there is a growing need for
intensive e-cycling operations, according to environmental
groups.Microsoft’s launch of its new Windows Vista operating system in
January is expected to trigger a flood of e-waste worldwide as people
upgrade to more advanced machines. The bulk of the technology trash
lands in developing nations such as China, according to Greenpeace. 

[Author]

July 23, 2007 at 2:36 PM