Talk:Recycling

This evening at Free Geek Oly, I'm scratching my head wondering what to do about a few components.

The answers to all these qustions must ultimatly be addressed by your individual material handlers. Only they know what they want and what they will pay for it. But I have added my $0.02. Good Luck ~jhasen

1. Aluminum hard drive shells that have small amounts of steel embedded (eg. odd screws and bolts). Would it be possible to sell this to people who want aluminum, for less than the price per lb of Aluminum?

Dirty aluminum is what our bin is sold as. Heat sinks make their way in with the steel clamps and

other items have the embedded steel as you say. We sell harddrives seperate because they are difficult to dissassemble, and the aluminum is hard to divide from the steel. We get about $.29/lb for them and we don't mine them for aluminum.

2. Hard drive shells that have a thin plastic coating over them (I'm pretty sure they're aluminum).

The plastic as far as I know dosen't pollute a aluminum bin in the same way as steel. Shouldn't worry about thin plastic.

3. Copper. We've been (obviously) demanufacturing hard drives and floppy drives around here, it is possible to get a nice chunk of copper out of them (little green spokes with copper wrapped around each of them). Also, I just noticed a light chemical burn on my fingers, I think after I picked up the copper spokes. Anyone had any experience with that? Any thoughts on what it could have been?

I have not experienced any chemical burns, it may be an allergic reaction.

I know that dirty copper brings a much lower price than bare, clean copper.

4. Controller boards (?) from floppy drives that have circuit boards printed onto steel. Meaning, one side is green with a light amount of circuitry and the other side is grey.

We only harvest the controller boards from hard drives, i don't believe the floppy controllers are the same grade.

Our floppy drives go into our motor bin whole (except for 5 1/4 drives from which we harvest the tasty aluminum tray.)

As I said above, you should call your material handelers and ask them these questions. Things may be different in your neck of the woods.

Organization of this page

I would highly suggest that the status parts of this page be broken off into a 'Recycling Status' page, as

1. it's better separation of logical content
2. it's better for the recent changes page
3. it's easier to find the complete status of recycling in a single glance
4. there's less chance you'll accidentally delete how to recycle monitors or something

--Jeff

Better. Much much better. Thanks Xen for letting me reorganize, and I hope you keep going with the madness. --Jeff