TLUG and government grants

[Jamon Camisso]

James Knott wrote:
> 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.

I worked in a recycling sorting plant (if you can call it that) in 
Barrie for a few days a couple of years ago. Its that big red 
monstrosity on the 400 as you go north. There were three types of waste 
that came in: wires, components (pcb components), and full towers. The 
place employed quite a few ex-convicts and worked through a temp-agency, 
so whatever labour costs were, they were next to nothing compared to the 
value of what they were sorting/extracting.

One night it was thousands of servers from Nortel, the next was Bell. I 
think most local recyling if it is not household waste is really just 
sorting so as to maximize the potential amount of waste per shipment. 
Not a high tech operation by any means -- I quit after 3 nights since 
people were mad at me for working too quickly.

>>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...

I can tell you from my two nights that everything with metal on it or 
just plain metallic, screws, boards, cases, hard drives, wires, pipes, 
etc. gets sorted and shipped to the appropriate recycler. The only thing 
that went in the garbage was plastic or organic waste. The rest was 
sorted into dumpster sized bins depending on metal and size.

Jamon
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