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Smart Trash May Be A Profitable Solution for E-Waste
by Lee H Goldberg
Smart Trash may sound like an oxymoron but, if my friend Dr. Valerie Thomas has her way, it will be the term that transforms e-waste from a costly problem to a profit center. The basic idea behind Smart Trash is simple – equip every product with a way to provide enough information about itself to enable efficient automated sorting and recycling. Dr. Thomas came up with this idea several years ago while she was teaching at Princeton University (she’s now at Georgia Tech) but it may have finally gotten the recognition it deserves when it was mentioned in a recent New York Times Magazine story about the most promising technologies of 2009.
Making items like batteries or cell phones more cost-effective to recycle can be as simple as placing a durable bar code in an inconspicuous spot on its case or embedding an inexpensive RFID tag. The label or tag would contain information about the product’s make, model and configuration which could be quickly read by a scanner when it arrives at a waste recovery plant. This would allow operators to quickly group similar products and direct them to the proper recycling process. Giving products the power to help sort themselves at the end of their life would allow recyclers to extract much more useable material from the waste stream instead of consigning it to a landfill, or an incinerator.
Embedding intelligence into the waste stream will also make it easy to identify high-value products like PCs TVs, and office equipment. Once segregated and sorted according to make and model they could be directed to work stations for extraction of valuable sub-assemblies, ICs and other components before they were torn down further for reclamation of their raw materials. Making it easy to recover components such as power supplies, memories, and processors instead of simply shredding them can dramatically improve the profitability of a recycling operation where even a few extra seconds of labor per unit can make the difference between making and losing money.
Ms. Thomas even envisions the day when “smart trash cans” will read product information as they are being disposed of. This information would in turn be transmitted to a waste disposal company’s data management system, or even transmitted to an on-line auction where recyclers bid for the container’s contents. Such a system could create a much more efficient market for e-waste and other recyclables, a market that would keep much more of our trash out of landfills and out of boats bound for dirty, inefficient offshore disposal sites in China and Africa. It’s exciting to think that my August 2006 editorial Smart Boxes: Applying Information Theory To Electronics Recycling that I shared with Dr. Thomas may have played some small part in the development of this potentially revolutionary concept.
It will take a massive effort to develop the standards necessary to make smart trash labeling and tagging practical and cost effective. Translating those standards into industry-wide practices will be equally formidable. Nevertheless, the rewards of these efforts will be even more substantial: both in terms of economic benefits and the cleaner, healthier world they will help create.
Comments? Questions? Other suggestions for improving the economics of e-waste recovery? Post your comments on our blog or write me at lhg at en-genius dot net.
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