Ecotech Services blog

Bang!

Alan Liefting

21 April 2016

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.

electronics, microwaves, repair
Not impressed with you Acer

Alan Liefting

21 April 2016

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.

quality, repair, safety
Repurposing – a good idea but usually too expensive?

Alan Liefting

11 April 2016
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
-----------------------------
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.
electronics
E-waste and e-scrap

Alan Liefting

25 March 2016

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.

e-scrap, e-waste, recycling
Robots and e-waste

Alan Liefting

25 March 2016

Robots are used a lot in manufacturing and I have been thinking about using them for e-waste processing. In most cases it is not a goer because set up costs are too high and the volumes are too small, but one thing that they could be used on is audio and video cassettes. We accept them for recycling and I was thinking of getting one of those cheap desktop robots to take them apart. More for fun than as a commercially viable operation. There is no money in processing tapes.

Anyway, what prompted this train of thought was the announcement of Liam, Apple’s iPhone dismantling robot. Good on you Apple for doing a little bit of product stewardship and making a start on automating the recycling process.

Liam – An Innovation Story

No Description

Apple, e-scrap, e-waste, recycling
Will the new safety laws do anything?

Alan Liefting

18 March 2016

This is a previously unpublished article that was submitted to news organisations.

In April the Health and Safety at Work Act will come into effect and it will be the first major change to workplace safety legislation in over twenty years. If we can use the number of fatalities as a proxy measurement for workplace safety overall we can look at some of the available data to see what effect the new law may have. Based on comparisons with other countries, a very difficult exercise for various reasons, we are doing slightly worse than some of the EU countries but much better than the litigious United States.

At present there are about 50 workplace fatalities per year, and according to data from 2009 the rate was about five deaths per 100,000 employees per year. Putting it another way it will take workers 20,000 years on the job before they have the statistical chance of being killed. Being a statistic they would of course have just as much chance of getting killed on the first day on the job as they would after working for 20,000 years.

In the period from 1993 to 2009 the average number of workplace fatalities did not actually change very much. The Health and Safety in Employment Act passed into law in 1993 but it had no effect on the recorded workplace fatalities. Also, over the 1993 to 2009 period there had been an absolutely huge change in workplace health and safety culture and policy. This also had no obvious effect. A similar situation happened when bicycle helmets became mandatory. Even though there was a huge uptake in the use of bicycle helmets there was no corresponding stepwise reduction in head injuries due to cycle accidents.

So are we seeing the long tail of the law of diminishing returns on the number of workplace fatalities? If this is the case then no matter how much policy is put in place there will be no effect on the fatalities. One reason why there will always be fatalities is the concept of risk compensation, where we will always aim for the same level of risk. This means that is does not matter how many health and safety procedures are implemented workers will always take risks with some risks leading to fatalities.

Another thing to consider is the effect of what may be onerous health and safety compliance on the cost of doing business in New Zealand. While larger companies can absorb an increase in compliance costs small businesses, on which the New Zealand economy is built, will feel the financial pinch. Businesses that are only marginally profitable will shut down. All else being equal, the work carried out by these businesses, which may need to be done in some cases and in all cases would be a contribution to the New Zealand economy, will shift to a country with less restrictive health and safety policies.

If any work currently done in New Zealand is forced to shift off shore to a country with less strict health and safety policies we should consider the ethics of this from a global perspective. Is it really ethical to allow some of the more dangerous industries to move off shore where foreign workers are killed instead of New Zealanders? Based on what has already happened with sourcing cheap labour, cheap recycling, and cheap waste disposal this is a likely scenario. So it the global workplace fatality rate remains the same would anything have been achieved with the new law?

The best piece of health and safety equipment, which some either choose not to or cannot use correctly, is the grey matter between our ears. And so how do we legislate for the use of our brain?

safety
A lot of packaging for a small screw

Alan Liefting

20 February 2016

I was sorting a consignment of recycling in one of our e-crates when I came across this:

Can you see the screw?

So here we have an M2x3 mm screw with part number DP/N OHCN8P or SG-OHCN8P-M0287-27C-1TRF REV A00. And it is quite a lot of packaging and quite a lot of part number for such a small item! Welcome to the 21st century I guess.

I think the screw is for a bit of Dell computer gear. Now Dell is normally quite good with their environmental policies but in this case it is not so good. This screw is probably used for mounting accessories. I would have thought a better way of supplying a screw for this sort of thing would be to incorporate it directly into the product. This idea is nothing new. In the old school XT’s and other desktop computers the screws used to hold in the expansion cards were part of the case (and held the blanking plates in place). Later models of desktop cases just had integral blanking plates that had to be broken out before putting in an expansion card. And there were no screws supplied!

Anyway, back to this M2x3 mm screw. Surely there would be a spot somewhere in or on the gear that it is used on where it could be stored? From an environmental point of view two plastic bags and a piece of paper would not be needed. From a job costing point of view there would be less material and less individual operations saving money on the production cost of the piece of gear.

Speaking of small screws I came across a website called LaptopScrews.com, a US based supplier that supplies, well, laptop screws. This is great! A supplier of a very specific product that is sometimes needed by repairers and DIYers.

e-waste, packaging, screws
Repair Manifesto

Ecotech Services administration

4 December 2015

Ecotech Services supports the Ifixit Repair Manifesto.

repair
Climate change and e-waste

Ecotech Services administration

2 December 2015

The COP21 climate change conference is currently in progress. While the major focus of climate change is around the use of fossil fuels there are other aspects that are drivers of climate change. One of these is waste.

Ecotech Services is working towards zero e-waste to landfill and takes all practicable steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process. We have a range of environmental policies in place to minimise waste and to minimise greenhouse gas emissions from our day to day operations.

In addition to these in-house measures the work that we do in repairing, refurbishing, and recycling various products leads to a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Repairing and refurbishing means that the embodied energy (that which has been used to produce and transport the item) is used over a longer period of time. Recycling, one of the other areas in which we work, is virtually always a better option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Due predominantly to the complexities of supply chains, doing emissions calculations for the work done by Ecotech Services is a difficult exercise. The New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990-2013 shows that emissions from waste itself has remained fairly constant over a thirteen year period, and in 2013 were 6.2% of total emissions. Of that 96.4% were from landfill methane emissions.

Landfill methane emissions are created by the break down of organic material. Since Ecotech Services generally only disposes of inert materials such as plastics, glass, and rubber rather than organic material, the climate change footprint of our waste disposal is very low. Additionally, the plastics going to landfill (which are problematic in terms of recycling) can be considered to be carbon sequestration.

climate change, e-waste, waste
Good old paint pails

Alan Liefting

24 October 2015

I know that I sometimes bang on about the evils of plastic and the sinfulness of using the stuff but plastic paint pails are heavenly! They are so good I get all evangelical about them.

For quite a while I have used the ten litre plastic paint pails in the garden and in the workshop and for all sorts of stuff. In the garden I use them to carry garden tools, soil, mulch, compost, and weeds that I have pulled out. In the garage workshop I use them as rubbish bins and for sorting out the recycling.

We also use them here at Ecotech Services. As well as for the small amount of waste going to landfill we use them for some of the sorting stages, especially for batteries. The pails themselves are pretty strong and they have a really strong carry handle. Compared to those cheap and nasty and flimsy buckets that you can buy from the supermarket the recycled paint pails are pretty damn good. And you have to actually PAY for the ones from the supermarket. Ok, it may only be a couple of dollars but the paint pails are FREE.

Over the years I have made a bit of a study of the pails. They used to only have paper labels and they used to be hard to peel off. On some of the newer pails the label peels of really easily and you are left with a nice clean looking pail. I don’t usually care much for my own appearance (hey, look at how I dress) but it is always good to have a professional image for the company. I have even painted over the labels that are moulded into the plastic to make them look good.

And that leads to the next thing. I think the in-mould labels are being used more often and I would want to paint over them. Would this make the pails (which are made of polypropylene) harder to recycle?

Since I am talking about paint pails I thought I had better mention the Resene Paints paint and packaging takeback scheme. They reuse and recycle what they can. Good on ya Resene!

plastics, reuse

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