TLUG and government grants

[James Knott]

Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Meng Cheah wrote:
> 
>> I'm curious. How does this work?
>> What do they do with the stuff they cannot re-use?
> 
> I don't know about the Toronto project, but the Portland FreeGeek
> project has a very elaborate way to sort, test and classify incoming
> hardware as re-usable or not. The first priority is to try to reuse
> things, especially those which can be brought back to life with a new
> capacitor here or a new power supply there.

The problem with this, is that the labour to do this often costs more
than the finished product is worth.  Back in the days when computer
circuit boards cost thousands of dollars, it was worthwhile to pay a
technician, such as myself, to take the time to repair the board.  With
PCs the replacement cost is so low, that there's no point in even trying
to repair a defective board.

> 
> When deemed unreusable, some components (such as the metal from most
> cases) can go right to recyclers. Other stuff such as power supplies and
> monitors and disk drives still contain some recyclable materials, and I
> believe there are companies that can extract it. Stuff that can't be
> reused or recycled still needs to be processed to make sure that no
> harmful elements (such as mercury) exists before seeing landfill.
> 
>> Does Toronto dispose of the computers in landfills, here or south?
>> Or ship them to China for recycling?
> 
> It's my understanding that the only recycling that gets sent in volume
> to China from other countries is for the extraction of precious metals
> from printed circuit boards. I was told while there that one southern
> province "specializes" in this, and the business owners make decent
> money from the resale of extracted gold, etc. However, they do pay a
> price; the area's water has to be trucked in because all the local wells
> have been poisoned by the chemicals used in the extraction. There's a
> reason why other countries won't do this...

Take as an example, old telephone cables.  These cables are full of
small gauge wires, insulated with plastic.  In the past, the practice
was to burn off the insulation, to recover the valuable copper.
However, polution laws now make it difficult to do that here.  So, just
ship it to China etc.

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