This box of stationary items came in with one of our e-waste recycling consignments.
It was going to be thrown out but our staff member said we would take it. It was unneeded due to a reduction in overseas student numbers and that is due to COVID-19.
So free pens for customers while stock last!
I sent this reply to an email that we received from one of our customers. Thought I would share it because there is a lot of good info here.
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Some of the answers to your questions are on our recycling processes page.
At this stage the countries that Ecotech Services is directly involved with in is only Australia. Our downstream recyclers would be sending processed e-waste to a number of countries. Note that exporting e-waste is covered by the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal as well as a few other international agreements. The countries that our downstream recyclers export to is documented on the EPA website.
We use reputable, well established organisations for downstream recycling and we expect that they comply with relevant legislation. I have anecdotal evidence from about fifteen years ago that e-waste was likely to have been exported illegally. I recently asked for auditing and compliance information from our downstream recyclers and the information was either not available or not forthcoming.
To answer your question as to where it all ends up is difficult to answer since the reverse supply chains for recycled materials is probably as long as those for the initial manufacturing of the items.
The items we receive are either refurbished, stripped for parts, or stripped of recyclable material. Items and recovered material are then sold with the waste going to landfill.
At present we do not have any external auditing of our processes. It is too expensive, not required, and takes time and finances away for the actual task of minimising the environmental impact of e-waste. See our auditing and certification pages.
It is impossible to give a definitive and quantitative answer to your question. To give an answer even approaching a worthwhile analysis would mean that we would have to either have a volume of e-waste that is simply not available to us at present (or indeed the whole industry) or we would have to charge our customers a ridiculously high price to recycle the e-waste
As you can see from the matters described above you simply cannot do an accurate full lifecycle analysis of your equipment. In my opinion doing a full lifecycle analysis of e-waste in New Zealand at present is not a worthwhile exercise.
I couldn’t save this calculator. It was too far gone!
The leaky battery corroded a lot of the PCB tracks.
Scrapped.
RIP.
Some manufacturers are just not learning from past manufacturing mistakes. Or they just don’t care about how long the stuff they make will last.
One of the faults with some electronic equipment is a glue used in manufacturing that becomes conductive with age (or age and heat). I first found out about it back in the 1990s when I was repairing CRT computer monitors at Phillips Electronics. It caused all sorts of faults.
Fast forward to the 2020s and there is still problems with conductive glue. Here is the insides of a Digistar DS-612T set top box.
The unit appeared dead but it eventually produced a display but that was about all. There is conductive glue in the power supply and around a logic ic. We got readings as low as about 1.5MΩ which will cause problems in any high impedance circuits.
We had to scrap the unit. What a waste.
<humour>
This is a reference chart for plug pinouts.
We can rely on xkcd to give us some good, reliable information.
</humour>
This MS-7LA calculator came in for recycling last year. It did not power on.
It is the holidays at present so I thought I would do some holiday hobby work (repairing things is one of my hobbies).
I undid the three screws on the back of the calculator and the back cover come off fairly easily. The leaky battery was easy to spot. I cleaned the circuit board and put in a new battery. Still no go! On closer inspection the circuit board pad looked a bit tarnished. I then spotted the completely corroded PCB track that would have been where the interface between the anode and cathode of the leaky battery was positioned.
I removed the battery clip, cleaned the anode terminal, and added a wire link (the blue wire in the photo below) to fix the corroded track.
With the battery back in the calculator was back in operation.
That all took me about 20 minutes. At our current labour rates that would have cost a customer $26 for the labour alone and at our current minimum repair fee cost it would have been $35. The battery costs $3.25 or $5.00 for one of good quality.
You can buy a roughly equivalent calculator of a well known brand for less than $4.00. The current Casio equivalent sells for $20 but I can probably only get $5 for the one that I repaired.
These brand new mains cables came in for recycling.
Not only was it a waste of time test and tagging brand new cables but they ended up with us for recycling.
We get hundreds of these cables both new and second hand.
This cable came in as part of a whole bunch of other stuff from an IT company.
Not sure why someone would want to make one of these. A mains plug to IEC connector cable is pretty easy to get hold of. We get them as new and used by the millions – well lots anyway.
The taped up joint is a bit dodgy! The Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 says that cables are unsafe if they “are inadequately protected against the risk of damage by the nature of their covering or their method of installation”. The AS/NZS 3760 In-service safety inspection and testing of electrical equipment standard says that tape should not be used, and I would agree on that point.
The wires were soldered and heatshrinked under the tape so it is not as bad as some of the others that I have seen.
Had a no name brand battery charger come in for recycling. I set it up on the bench to test it. It powered up but after a bit it turned off. I took the thing apart. Pretty easy to do. Four screws at each end holding the slit extrusion case together and one holding a couple of TO220 packaged devices in place. The earthing was far from ideal. It was just tucked under a self tapping screw and none of the paint had been removed.
So of course the thing will not play up with the covers off! I set it up with a battery to check the charging. That all looked good.
(I’d better not mention here that I put the battery on with reverse polarity and blew the output fuse. Hey, I blame the fact that I did not have a black jumper lead. Yeah right!)
I moved it a bit to look at the front panel and there was a spark and it stopped working! “Oh s**t!” I thought to myself “what have I shorted out?”. Powered it up again and it still did not work. Better do some fault tracing. And then it sparked again. Ha! It is sparking in the Faston style connector. I was lucky that it had one of the clear insulating boots over it so I could easily see the sparking.
The connector had been crimped but the wire gauge was too small for the connector so they just soldered them. In this case there is a big solder blob that got nowhere near the wire. So it was a very loose connection.
Not only did they cut corners with thin wires but they also threw these things together really quickly. The solder hardly melted before they moved on to the next one. And there was probably no quality control or burn in testing.
Such a shame.
I did a decent job of soldering it and then added some proper earthing.
This is one of the reasons why this type of mains plug should not be used in wet areas. It had arced between phase, neutral, and earth when wet, which carbonised the plastic of the plug.
The other reason is for electrical safety.
An extension cable can traverse wet areas but the plugs and sockets should not get wet, unless they are rated for wet areas.