Recent  Stories

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Plans go electrnonic: An Ontario-wide Electronic Plans Room is set to roll out in the New Year. John Mollenhauer, president of the Toronto Construction Association (TCA), said things are on track for an agreement between the 11 Ontario construction associations by Christmas.

Black Gold: Where most people see obsolete computers and electronics, Alfred Hambsch sees more than gold, he sees black gold. As the president of the largest eWaste recycling company on the planet, Mr. Hambsch has built not just a business but a calling, taking obsolete electronics and processing them back into useable raw materials including gold and diesel fuel.

Take Charge of Your Website: In the beginning there was the Webmaster and he was God. And the Webmaster said, let there be a domain for this business and there was; Then the Webmaster said let the home page be divided from the other pages, and it was. And then the Webmaster said: If you need to make any more changes, I bill by the hour and I don’t work nights or weekends.”  Ouch.

Videoconferencing: Dennis Sandow chuckles recalling his “Halo moment” – the illusion created by the videoconferencing system that a colleague was in intimate proximity even though they were thousands of miles apart.

Party Favours: If you’re going to crash a party, it’s best to bring something along to smooth your entry, like a keg of beer, or risk a humiliation and rejection. It’s a strategy businesses should consider as they seek to leverage the virtual block parties evolving from virtual communities and social media.

Silicon Valley, Calif – Imagine picking up your Toronto Star and seeing the headlines  update before your eyes. Science fiction? Don’t bet against it. ePaper as it’s often called, is a quest being funded with millions of dollars in research and development by some of the biggest names like Hewlett-Packard, Phillips Electronics and Xerox.

Social Media: Andy Warhol was half right: Fifteen minutes is just the beginning. Social media – the collective of blogs, forums, e-mail, Instant Messaging and text messaging – makes us all celebrities, all the time.

Getting there half the fun: “Kate” is not happy.“In 500 metres, make a U-turn,” she insists, the Irish lilt in her voice clear on the “ur” of the word “turn.” “Kate” as I’ve nicknamed her, is my newest traveling companion, a Ground Position Satellite guided navigation program running on my mobile phone.

Ontario eWaste facility mining for black gold

IAN HARVEY

Where most people see obsolete computers and electronics, Alfred Hambsch sees more than gold, he sees black gold.

As the president of the largest eWaste recycling company on the planet, Mr. Hambsch has built not just a business but a calling, taking obsolete electronics and processing them back into useable raw materials including gold and diesel fuel.

And sometime next month he’ll take delivery of a machine to turn plastic scrap into diesel fuel which will drive generators to power the other machines used in the recycling process.

It’s an ambitious scheme whose end goal is not just reducing costs within Barrie Metals Group’s sprawling 30-acre plant beside Highway 400 in Barrie, Ontario, but to eliminate the last four per cent of materials which had previously gone to landfill as unsalvageable.

“When you have mixed plastics, say PVC and polyethylene, nobody wants to buy them because you can’t reuse them,” says Mr. Hambsch in a telephone interview from North Carolina where he is checking on his similar operations there. “It was going to landfill. Now, we can turn it back into what it started as, oil, but diesel oil.”

How much fuel the process will recover and at what energy costs are still a bit fuzzy.

“We have to install it and start processing material and get it working,” says Mr Hambsch, who recently bought out a German-based eWaste recycler in Edmonton, Alberta to build a $10 million plant there to process 30,000 tonnes annually and also has an Asian facility. “I don’t want to make wild estimates. But the process is very efficient and works at low pressure and temperatures of only about 250 to 350C.”

The real win, he insists, is less than one per cent of all the materials coming into his plant will end up in landfill.

Currently, core eWaste processing entity, Global Electric Electronic Processing Inc, a division of the privately-held BMG – runs a just over half the 40,000 tonnes a year capacity to process eWaste and also strips cables to recover ferrous and non-ferrous metals. It turns over $100 million annuals in sales with more than 250 employees.

The process is labour and mechanically intensive. First components are stripped by hand to separate circuit boards, glass screens, plastic shells, wiring and other components. Then machines grind and shred the pieces, further separating them.

Elements such as copper, gold, silver and glass are bought as raw materials and returned to the manufacturing cycle, as are most of the plastics.

“We’re so far behind here in Ontario with this, and in North America too,” says Mr. Hambsch who bought BMG in 1984, nine years after arriving in Canada from his native Germany. “I went to Europe for this technology because there, as of March this year, they have zero landfill sites. They have to deal with it.”

North America, with its vast tracts of land, simply buries junked electronics, making Mr. Hambsch shudder as he counts off the toxins engineered into the average computer and monitor.

Environment Canada estimated about 140,000 tonnes of computer equipment, phones, televisions, stereos and small appliances went to Canadian landfills in 2002, concealing  4,750 tonnes of lead, 4.5 tonnes of cadmium and 1.1 tonnes of mercury, he says, but for the most part North American authorities haven’t caught up with the reality that 85 per cent of discarded electronics and electrical equipment are being buried.

New regulations in Europe as of July this year – the Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (RoHS)  - bans materials like lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls or poly-brominated diphenyl ethers from electronic products and indications are other jurisdictions will adopt the standards, meaning future components will be safer to dispose of.

In the meantime, however, there is a massive toxic legacy of equipment lurking in homes and business now.

In Ontario in 2004, according to a study by Waste Diversion Ontario, of the 200,000 tonnes of “white appliances” (washing machines, fridges, dishwashers and dryers), audio visual electronics, IT and telecommunications equipment disposed of, only the household appliances were diverted in any meaningful numbers. About 62 per cent of the 110,000 tonnes of “white” appliances were diverted to recycling but up to 99 per cent of the rest of the materials went to landfill.

The WDO study delivered to the Minister of Environment last summer recommends setting up a diversion and recycling program. There are, however, questions around funding. One model calls for manufacturers and importers to become “stewards” and pay into a fund for future diversion and recycling while the version favoured by the industry is a levy at the retail level paid by consumers.

While either scenario is a potential political minefield, the report is now “under consideration” and likely to progress soon because it’s a hot environmental issue at the highest level.

Even then, implementation is a mammoth task.

“There’s the issue of what standards do we set for the recyclers?” notes Jo-Anne St. Godard executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario. “We need to ensure they are responsible and not just dumping material or shipping it offshore to jurisdictions where standards are more lax.”

 Ultimately, she says, the process of disposal must start with the design, a curiously sensible concept in which engineers create products intended to be re-used and recycled with minimal effort.

“Hewlett-Packard, for example, wants to use the plastic from their computers and printers again as raw materials, so they’re designing products where the plastic can be easily stripped away,” she says.

Hambsch is adamant some action is long overdue.

“It makes no difference if the toxins are leaching into the St. Clair river from the left bank or the right bank,” Mr. Hambsch, says referring to the convoy of trucks departing Toronto daily destined for landfill in Michigan. “Pollution from eWaste is global issue.”

In Ontario, GEEP’s raw materials come from businesses looking to dispose of obsolete equipment and not from municipal waste diversion programs. Alberta is the only province with an integrated disposal fee on electronics to pay GEEP’s Edmonton plant $700 a tonne to process eWaste into re-useable commodities.

Similar levies are in place in California, Maine and under consideration in North Carolina where GEEP’s sister company shreds and processes materials for shipment to Barrie for further refining.

“We have to think of the end of a product’s life when we buy it,” he said. “Globally eWaste processing is already a $30 billion business but the U.S. produces as much eWaste as the rest of the world combined. This is the fastest growing industry on the plant. We’ll need another 100 plants like mine just for North America.”