Rosita Boland follows the recycling process, in which everything ends up in a type of vortex, being broken into bits the size of a fingernail
'We want your Weee," proclaims the huge sign outside TechRec's warehouse in Dublin's Park West. That's Weee as in 'waste electronic and electrical equipment', which TechRec specialises in recycling.
Once upon a bad time, old fridges and cookers and washing machines got dumped. Some ended up in bogs, some in rivers and some in landfill. While we still have an appalling tendency to litter our environment, at least now there is less dumping of household electrical items. If you buy a new washing machine, for instance, the shop you buy it from is now required by law to remove the old one and get it disposed of in an environmentally safe way.
This week, it was announced that waste charges for some electrical goods will be reduced from the beginning of August. This week, the Department of Environment also announced that since the scheme began, Weee recycling has gone up five-fold.
So what happens our Weee? Where does it go and how is it disposed of? At present, TechRec handles 10 per cent of all Weee in the State. The rest goes to Europe to be recycled there.
According to TechRec commercial director Brendan Palmer, it's only in the last 10 years that people have started to think about recycling electronic waste. The company opened in March and is currently the State's only fully automated recycling plant.
"We have capacity to recycle 50 per cent of all Weee in the State," Palmer says. "It shouldn't be going abroad to be recycled, that's generating more waste to the environment to get it there."
TechRec's warehouse is huge, and almost unbearably noisy. The stuff that arrives here - computers, phones, kettles, irons, white goods, batteries, everything electrical you can think of - comes from a variety of sources, including bring centres; via shops selling electrical goods, who have agents such as Thorntons or Greenstar to get the old Weee to Park West; and directly from businesses.
All day, every day, lorries pull up outside with containers of Weee. On the morning The Irish Times visits, a lorry-load of old computers arrives. They get dumped on the floor of the warehouse and then someone goes through them, cutting off the cables by hand. "The plastic casing will be recycled and also the metal inside the cables," explains Paddy Boyce, a business development manager at TechRec.
The computers then go to another area, where people remove the plastic casings. Everything is sorted into different bins, depending on the materials. Most of the computers coming in for recycling have the big old cathode tubes, which contain leaded glass. The clear glass screens are cut off from their glass-leaded backs by machines, to be recycled separately.
POSSIBLY THE MOST dramatic part of all the dismantling is when the stripped-down equipment gets dumped into a pit that contains a conveyor belt. Everything on this is carried up to the "QZ Machine", a kind of vortex where everything in it gets broken down into small pieces, no bigger than the size of a fingernail. Then, depending on the material - plastic or metal - the pieces go to separate conveyor belts via a hammer mill, and then are sorted according to size.
It's all done on a staggering scale - all but 2 per cent of everything that comes in the door is recycled and sold on. "We're unlocking the value in these old machines," Boyce says, sifting through an enormous container of metal - zinc, copper and brass. "We're doing the mining for companies who need this metal." The metal goes to smelters in Germany, which have capacity for sorting the different kinds of metals. China is currently taking most of the plastics. TechRec charges companies between 15 cent and 60 cent per kilo of waste to recycle it. They sell on the recycled high-grade plastic for about €150 a tonne.
TechRec's mission is to go to full capacity and to recycle 50 per cent of the State's Weee. While it deals primarily with businesses, waste agents and bring centres, it also wants to encourage the public - who can be quite distant from the end results - to be more mindful about recycling.
The company has organised an open day on September 2nd, to which the public are invited to bring all their old unwanted electrical appliances - radios, fridges, washing machines, computers, phone, kettles, irons, toasters. TechRec will take them all for free on that day. Refreshments and entertainment will be offered, which must make it a first for a party in a warehouse full of obsolete cookers, fridges and kettles.