BUSINESS | E-WASTE RECYCLING that none of that ambient dust is being inhaled by workers or is discharged to the environment. So then you’re left with the electronics without the hazards, and those go through a series of mechanical shredders. We then have several different mechanical separation technologies. For example, we’ll pull off steel using its magnetic properties and we get a nice clean steel chip that we sell to a steel mill. It can be formed into any product that you typically would make from steel such as rebar for the construction industry. Then we pull off aluminum, which goes to an aluminum smelter to be re-consumed. Copper goes to make new wiring, new copper tubing, or new electronics. The capacity of our combined plants is about 100,000 tonnes per year and we employ about 200 people.
Cindy Coutts, president of SIMS Recycling olutions Canada. S
ACCN How do you get your e-waste? CC In Canada, until about four years ago — and only two
years ago in Ontario — e-waste was recycled on an entirely voluntary basis. A company, government or school with old electronics had a few options. Firstly, you could just put it in a landfill. You can still do this; it’s not illegal in most jurisdictions in Canada. Secondly, you could look up recycling on the Internet, but what you’d most likely find are companies I’ll call “sham recyclers.” They would pick up the e-waste and ship it to the developing world. When it arrives, they use cheap manual labour to pick out the bits that have value: the copper, steel and aluminum. Anything difficult or costly to recycle, like the CRT leaded glass, would get dumped in the rivers and ditches and lakes. Finally, if you wanted to do the right thing, you could work with a company like SIMS, and there’s a charge for environmentally sound recycling. It’s fairly nominal, but there’s still a charge. In the past few decades, we’ve seen the concept of extended producer responsibility, or EPR. This is a global concept that sprang out of jurisdictions in Europe and Japan, where waste is a much more urgent problem because there’s far less land space. EPR is a concept that puts the onus back on the producer to manage the full life cycle of their products and this led to the concept of product stewardship. In product stewardship, regulations are put in place mandating manufacturers to manage their products at the end of their life. They typically do that by levying a fee at the point of sale of a new product; if you purchase a new television in Ontario right now, you’ll notice that there’s a fee on your invoice, called a recycling fee. That fee goes into a pool
that is managed by a not-for-profit corporation set up by the manufacturers. The corporation effectively doles this money out to recyclers that meet the standards to conduct proper recycling on their behalf. ACCN Why charge a fee for r ecycling waste? CC The economics are such that the resources we produce give
us a positive revenue, but some of them cost us to produce. For example, steel gives us a positive revenue, but something like mercury will cost money to recycle properly. So depending on resource prices, these can net close to nothing. You need to charge a fee for the recycling process to liberate all those resources and to encourage investment into the technology that can do this. This can come from the stewardship programs I mentioned earlier. For example, Ontario currently offers an incentive of $650 per tonne for personal computers and $850 per tonne for display devices.
JULY • AUGUST 2011 CANADIAN CHEMICAL NEWS 21