Covering Recycling On A Daily Basis

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Day to Day Requirements

• Volunteers - They tend to show up at 11 and again at 3, though walk ins and odd shifts exist on a daily basis. You need to get them started, after a brief explanation of where things go, they can work (for the most part) with little supervision. Moving clockwise, get them acquainted with the bins.

• Make sure that the folks who are testing monitors are consolidating space on monitor mountain. Left unchecked, the monitors will spread like a stain across the warehouse floor. Try and keep them from being stacked in front of the gaylords as they will be leaving someday soon. If you have the volunteer power and are sure we have pallets and gaylords to support it, initiate a game of monitor tetris. Do realize that sometimes things are just super out of control with the monitors, and do the best you can to keep the aisles to the black hole and from the roll up door to the gaylords clear.

• As gaylords become full, they will have to be switched out for new ones. Use the pallet jack to move the full bin over to the rows of gaylords waiting to leave. Sweep out the empty space if it needs it and place a pallet on the floor with the slots facing out (so it can be moved when it, in turn, is full).Take a gaylord from the stack and lug it over by the pallet. Unfold it into box shape and choose an end to be the bottom. Fold the flaps inward to form the bottom and place it on the pallet. There is a right way to align the gaylord with the pallet, if it seems wide and shallow, you have it on wrong.

Areas of Recycling

The Bench

Almost every tool needed to de-manufacture a computer and many that are not can be found scattered the length of the bench. Power screwdrivers are hardwired to the bench with fixed Phillips head bits. Screws have many containers that collect screws as well as containers for batteries. Gloves can be found on the shelves below and at the end of the bench closest to the Mad Max cart is a first aid kit. Tell the volunteers that if they run across something you didn't cover, run into a problem or forget where stuff goes, just set it aside and ask you the next time they see you, and then make sure they see you often enough for this to work. If you also cannot deal with it, place it in a box for someone to deal with later.

Pre-Op Bins Behind The Bench

• Daughter Boards - All ISA PCI AGP and the like, type daughter boards that come to recycling are to start off here. People coming from testing, card and motherboard sorting, or build with boxes full of these things are to be told to put them here. There is a workstation of sorts here and that task will be outlined further down.

• Small Steel - This is the recycling tub on the floor in the middle aisle. Small steel pieces such as the faceplates from daughter boards and numerous other forms are easier to dump into the bin than standing on your head in the mad max cart to gather a thousand little pieces and throw handfuls of them into the air.

• Stainless steel - Inside of computers, one runs across a lot of shiny thin metal. Some of it is stainless steel, most of it is just steel. A cardboard box is there to sort the stainless into. Only a magnet knows for sure. Magnets are affixed to the waist height edge of the workbench in several places. If the shiny metal is held to the magnet after you let go, it is steel, it should be placed in the Mad Max cart or the small steel, depending on its size. If it slides off the magnet or will barely stick at all, it is stainless and should be put in the box.

• Aluminum - A plastic tub. This is the place for aluminum which is mostly encountered as heat sinks from on top of processors. Aluminum can be identified with a magnet, it is metal that will not stick at all. This qualification may confuse it with stainless, but aluminum is rarely used as thin or shiny, it is usually colored and thick. Quite often there will be some kind of steel apparatus to hold a heat sink to a motherboard, this should be removed and placed in the small steel bin. Fans are also embedded in heat sinks and should be removed and placed with the fans.

• Fans - This cardboard barrel is for any fans that are found inside the computers. It is not necessary nor is it recommended that volunteers open up power supplies to remove those fans.

• Speakers - Most computers have a naked speaker inside of them, this cardboard barrel is where they go.

• Hard Drives - This cardboard barrel is for the hard drives (which are frequently mistaken for floppy drives). You should point out the obvious difference between them; hard drives have no door to allow things to be put inside. You may need to explain this many times if hard drives keep showing up in the motor bin. Floppy drives should be removed from this barrel and placed in the motor bin while or before emptying this barrel into the gaylord of hard drives out on the warehouse floor.

• Batteries- These toxic nastys are to be gathered and sorted into two categories:

1. rechargeable
2. not rechargeable

and then the nonrechargeable are sorted into

1. alkaline
2. NiCad
3. lithium
4. Button cells.

Once they are sorted they are to be sealed in 5 gallon buckets and labeled properly.Once the buckets are labeled they can live by the stack of broken down gaylord boxes.Due to leakage of batteries latex gloves should be worn during this process .