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!
We get a lot of brand new monitor stands in for recycling. It seems that companies buy monitors and stick them straight on to monitor arms. I was thinking that the manufacturers should sell the monitors without stands. This would reduce prices and stop wastage.
Well it turns out that Dell actually supply at least one model without a stand.
Good on you Dell!
If you need a stand for a monitor we keep a lot of the ones that come in for recycling.
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.
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.
So what is happening here?
Does the Mackenzie District Council have a zero waste strategy or not? And is Transit New Zealand supporting it or not?
I took this photo earlier this year at the Mount Cook information centre on the main highway by Lake Pukaki. Here at Ecotech Services we are quite clear on our zero waste policy. We aim towards zero e-waste to landfill and do our best with keeping all other waste generated out of the landfill.