We had a hot water cylinder come in for recycling. It is not something that we have had before but I knew that they have valuable copper as the actual cylinder. It was pulled out of a house because it had a leak in the base. A date written inside the cylinder for an element change said 1986 so it is at least 30 years old.
Before I started pulling it apart I saw some wadding that looked like carpet. Sure enough, when I took the ends off this is what fell out:
You don’t see shredded carpet used in modern hot water cylinders. The newer ones are pumped full of insulating foam from what I gather. Sure, specialist insulating foam is probably better than shredded carpet as an insulator, but it is not a recycled product. And can the foam be recycled at the end of its useful life?
The carpet has been downcycled, which is recycling into something of less use that the original thing. Downcycling is better than not recycling at all but it is not as good as recycling it into something that can go back into what it came from originally (or an equivalent).
I don’t think shredded carpet has any real use so unfortunately we will have to dump it. Damn, it looks like our monthly mass balance will be on the environmental debit side!
This is a packet from a McDonald’s Princess Bubblegum Happymeal toy:
It had blown off the street into our driveway.
The bag is made in China, the contents are made in Vietnam, and it is distributed in New Zealand and Australia.
There are some pretty strong parallels between this incident and the whole e-waste problem. That is a long bow to draw you might say so let me explain. A lot of cheap commodity electronics items are made in China from parts made there and elsewhere. They are distributed around the world. At the end of their useful life they are discarded, sometimes on roadsides.
To me it also epitomises the uncaring, wasteful society in which we live.
For a few years now I have been running Ubuntu 14.0.0 on an old Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop (from the Microsoft Windows XP era). It was sort of as an experiment but it was also because I like to keep the old stuff operational for as long as possible. Linux operating systems are less resource hungry compared to the offerings from Microsoft and so the good old Toshiba did everything you would expect from a much newer computer.
There were a few issues though. It would run quite hot for one. I don’t know if the hardware did not like to be pushed too hard with playing full screen videos, or that there was a problem with the thermal management, lack of Ubuntu drivers, or all three issues.
The lack of integration with Microsoft products also made using a Linux based operating system a little awkward.
For a little while the laptop had developed a fault where the screen would flicker or briefly disappear and then the cursor could be moved but clicking did nothing. Also, it would sometimes not wake up after going into standby. It seemed to be a fault that was related to movement of the motherboard. I had stripped it down after it started happening but there was no obvious cause. As is often the case for these faults it stopped playing up for a while after being checked.
The intermittent fault was getting a little worse but then one evening, quite suddenly, the laptop stopped charging. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the battery was pretty well stuffed and the charger had to be plugged in virtually all the time. I did all the usual things a technician does. I checked the charger. No problems there. So I stripped down the laptop and started doing some fault tracing. The two fuses were ok, the low ohm resistors were ok, the coils were ok but one looked like it had been running hot.
And then I noticed this:
Looks like the magic smoke escaped from the chip.
Looks like the chip is toast and pretty much so is the whole laptop. The chip is close to the hard drive connector but the hard drive was still working. Interesting. It does not matter if the hard drive is stuffed because everything that is important is on the cloud.
Time to dig another laptop out of the recycling pile. I found a Toshiba Satellite M300 that looks like it only needed an LCD cable. Cheap enough on Aliexpress so I ordered one. Another laptop that was kicking around was a HP G60 that had been running Windows 7. It had a stuffed hard drive.
Now I know from past experience that you cannot pull a hard drive out of one machine and just bung it into another one and expect it to work. There are all sorts of driver issues. To possibly make things easy and as an experiment I thought I might try to drop the hard drive out of the Toshiba straight into the HP. And guess what! It worked! I am typing this blog post minutes after the transplant! The only thing I had to do differently is to enter the wireless password. I have struck this before. It seems that the wireless password is stored in hardware somewhere rather than on the hard drive.
So is this all an indication of how good the generic Linux drivers are? It is not really a security issue since I still had to enter my login password. So is this the way of the future where we pull the solid state hard drive out of a stuffed old machine and bung it in a new one? Sounds like a good idea to me.
In a referendum on 23 June 2016 the voting public of the UK chose to leave the EU with 52% wanting to leave and 48% wanting to remain. This will possibly have implications on addressing the many negative environmental and social effects of electrical, electronics, and computer technology.
The EU has long been on the global forefront of policies that promote sustainable technologies. One of the earlier Directives draw up by the European Economic Community on limiting waste led to a Directive on battery recycling. Anecdotal evidence from European tourists in New Zealand suggest that it has produced a culture of battery recycling. The tourists are astounded that there is no means of easily having their batteries recycled while in New Zealand. Amongst other things the EU is now working on policies that include trying to address conflict minerals and developing the idea of a Circular Economy.
Thanks to the EU the Micro B USB plug is now a common standard on phones, tablets, and e-book readers.
EU policies have had a global reach. Here in New Zealand I can think of two that have had an effect. One of them would be noticed by electronics engineers and technicians every time they order a part since they are often specified with the RoHS compliance information. RoHS is the EU Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive limiting the levels of toxic materials contained in products.
Another effect of the EU, which many people can see on a daily basis, is the micro B USB connector used on a large number of mobile phones and other portable electronic devices. As an attempt to reduce the environmental impact of the large number of incompatible chargers the EU proposed a Directive to force standardisation onto the manufacturers. Most of the manufacturers banded together and responded by developing a Memorandum of Understanding to hamonise portable device charges based on the micro B USB connector.
In correspondence earlier this year with the Minister for the Environment Nick Smith said that there are no plans at present to emulate EU policies such as reducing hazardous materials contained in products (as per the EC RoHS), identification and the possible ban of the importation of conflict minerals, development of a Circular Economy, priority product status, producer responsibility, or product stewardship for electrical, electronic, and computer devices (addition to what is currently being done), adopting a universal charging standard for mobile devices, mandatory battery recycling, or adoption of an Integrated Product Policy. As a country we are at least twenty five years behind the EU in terms of technology related environmental policy and this is another black mark against so called clean green New Zealand.
Because it is a significant player an exit by the UK from the EU waters down the the strength of the EU bloc and there is also a possibility that other countries may follow. Given the level of disruption, the level of dissatisfaction with the referendum result, and that it is nonbinding it is possible that a Brexit may not actually happen.
With the global environmental, social, and economic issues with which we face there is a strong need for a supranational organisation with governance that is acceptable to every nation-state.
An Ozito OZCD12V1A cordless drill came in to us for recycling and it looked like it had hardly been used. Rather than recycling it I thought it might be a good candidate for repurposing or rehashing with different batteries.
Never been soldered!
On inspection I found that the NiCd batteries were leaking (this may or may not be an issue since I have no idea how old it is) but more importantly I found that a wire on the transformer in the power supply had never been soldered at the factory! It didn’t help that the circuit board on the transformer was only flimsily attached.
The drill was hardly used, possibly because that batteries could not get charged?
I don’t know how the mechanical side stacks up but the electronics is pared back to an absolute minimum. Firstly, there is no filter capacitor in the charger power supply. You can get away without one in some cases but it is usually good practice to have it. The NiCd charging circuit is really basic. Maybe even too basic to the extent that it may damage the NiCd cells. It consists of six components, and two of those are indicator LED’s. Having the two LED’s (one red and one green) is one positive thing. Sometimes cheap products only use one. Temperature sensing of the NiCd cells is also non-existent and that, coupled with the lack of battery voltage detection, means that the really basic charging regime will shorten the lifetime of the cells.
It is a real shame that consumers demand cheap products and manufacturers supply them. It is creating unnecessary environmental problems
Kathmandu, a New Zealand based outdoor equipment supply company, made it to the news when employees from one of their stores were observed slashing sleeping bags and other products before throwing them in a rubbish skip. The company said they were faulty goods returned by customers. They were destroyed to prevent them being returned again as faulty goods. That is a cop-out of course, because they can demand a sales receipt from the customer or the products could have been identified as being faulty stock and therefore not eligible for replacement.
Household appliances such as radios were economical to repair but cheap electronics products sourced from the Asian countries gradually made repairs less likely. Image: Wikimedia Commons
What happened at Kathmandu also happens with electronics products.
Consumer electronics, as with outdoors gear, is made cheaply in China. The wholesale price must be stupefyingly low considering that you can buy a complex bit of electronics gear for something like $10 retail after it has passed though wholesalers and transport companies. These low wholesale prices are a disincentive to have items repaired. An item with a retail price of $10 is obviously a throw-away item if it fails but I have heard of electronic equipment with a sell price of up to $600 being treated as a throw-away item if it fails within the warranty period.
There are a lot of things that can be done instead of throwing electronic products into the rubbish.
Companies can have products repaired at their cost rather than throwing it out. It would give them a degree of environmental credibility. If there are a lot of faulty items they can be done in a batch to make gains in efficiency.
Some faulty products can be stripped of usable spare parts to fix up other ones. A good technician would know how to do this in such a manner that the reliability of the repaired product is not compromised. Sometimes this technique cannot be used when the same part fails in every individual product.
To reduce the rate of failure, a company should ensure the products are made to a decent standard in the first place. This generally makes products more expensive and unfortunately consumers buy on price rather than reliability or effect on the environment.
If none of that is possible recycling is a viable option and may not cost anything.
All this reminds me of a story I heard back in the mid 1980s about television parts. Philips New Zealand, the local branch of the Dutch multinational, had a whole stack of television circuit boards that they probably could not sell so they took them out to the car park and destroyed them. In this case it was apparently for tax purposes. Writing off old stock is good for the company profits.
It is a shame the profit is always the bottom line in the corporate world.
This photo shows what a power surge can do. The fuse in this microwave oven absorbed so much energy that the end cap of it completely vapourised and shunted it along the fuse holder.
Bang! (check out the hardware bug)
The body of the ceramic fuse remained intact which is what it is supposed to do
It looks like the power surge was between live and earth because the capacitor (next to the fuse in the photo) had a very small eruption visible on its body. It measured as 4nF and it is supposed to be 4.7nF. The corresponding capacitor on the neutral side of the filter measured correctly as 4.7nF. They are an X1/Y2 rated capacitor (as what would be expected) and it looks like it took the surge pretty well.
Now look here Acer. I usually like your products. They are generally pretty well made (we’ll overlook that case in the late 1990s where the edge connectors in one of your laptops had insufficient gold plating causing a fault common to that model).
Anyway, I was not impressed with your model A2.1 multimedia speakers for a couple of reasons. Firstly, even though you gave it the nice design feature of supplying the mains power out on a IEC 60320 fly lead why on Earth didn’t you put in a current sensing circuit so that the speaker circuitry is only powered when there is a load connected? And while we are on energy efficiency, why did you use an inefficient main frequency transformer instead of a switching power supply?
Secondly, why did you simply glue the thing together? And weakly at that. It virtually fell apart when I showed it the spludger tool! Well not quite but you know what I mean. Now I am no health and safety Nazi but mains powered items that come apart easily are a bit of a electrical shock hazard.
Here is the insides of the Acer A2.1 multimedia speakers.
Yeah, I know the answer to these questions. It comes down to cost doesn’t it. But come on. Just how much market share will you lose if you made a slightly better product that costs a bit more?
The speakers came in for recycling but when I tested it the only fault was a scratchy volume control that sometimes caused the left speaker to cut out. All it needed was a squirt of cleaner to fix it, and I suppose I will just have to glue the thing back together.
Here at Ecotech Services we like the idea of repurposing stuff as a way of stopping it going to the landfill but it seems that in most cases it is not something that makes us any money. For example take a look at this Sony DCC-E455A mobile phone charger that came in for recycling.
The insides of a Sony DCC-E455A car charger.
It puts out 4.5V at 500mA so it can be repurposed as a charger for newer phones. It looks like the maximum current on USB 2.0 is 500mA. So all that is needed is to look up the data on the chip (a JRC 2360AD), figure out how to change the voltage to 5V (a simple matter of putting a suitable resistor in the output voltage sensing circuit), and then fit a Micro B USB plug.
This is an application circuit from the datasheet for a step down converter that is roughly the same as the one in the Sony charger. The R1/R2 voltage divider would need adjusting to get 5 volts out.
So lets do a costing for the repurposing:
USB 2.0 Micro B plug $3.76
Resistor $1.00
Labour $34.50
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TOTAL $39.26 (New Zealand dollars)
You can buy a new car charger for about $5 (although it would not be the same quality as the Sony product) so quite obviously repurposing is not a commercially viable option. Also, this particular charger has the two halves welded together so it needed to be prised apart. It would need to be glued back together after the modification. This would make it a very unprofessional repurposing job.
Another way it can be repurposed is to just use the circuit board itself as a DC-DC converter embedded into a piece of equipment. It does not have to be a 12V input voltage because the 2360 chip can accept up to 40V, although a 35V electrolytic capacitor is used on the input. There may be other design considerations when running on a higher voltage such as the power dissipation by the chip.
The conclusion for repurposing in this case? Obviously not commercially viable but something the DIYer or hardware hacker could do.
Here at Ecotech Services we have blogged a lot about e-waste and we have got some info pages about it. Our mission is actually to turn all e-waste into e-scrap. E-scrap is the stuff that is recycled and e-waste goes off to landfills (or something worse).
I’ll have to put in a plug (pardon the pun!) for E-scrap News, a US based newsletter from the Resource Recycling publishers. If you are into e-waste and e-scrap I highly recommend that you subscribe to it.
In a referendum on 23 June 2016 the voting public of the UK chose to leave the EU with 52% wanting to leave and 48% wanting to remain. This will possibly have implications on addressing the many negative environmental and social effects of electrical, electronics, and computer technology.
