Workers at Barrie Metals Group sort electronic waste by hand and strip out circuit boards, glass screens, plastic shells, wiring and other components that contain recyclable material.

The Barrie Metals Group recycling plant uses a catalyst and turbines to heat up waste plastic, extracting about 300 litres of diesel fuel an hour.

With truckloads of obsolete electronics arriving daily, Alfred Hambsch's sprawling 12-hectare facility in Barrie, Ont., doesn't look much like a milestone on the road to sustainability. But looks can be deceiving.

It's not what comes into the Barrie Metals Group (BMG) recycling plant, an hour north of Toronto, it's what doesn't go out.

"I'm opposed to landfills," says Hambsch. "Our goal is to have zero materials go to landfills."

The facility separates the electronics into their plastic, metal and glass components and diverts them for recycling. This is nothing new — there are plants all over North America that do similar recycling work. But it's the company's treatment of plastics that turns heads: They're fed into a unique machine that processes them back into their base hydrocarbons.

In plain language, the machine turns plastic into diesel fuel.

"It's a one-of-a-kind machine from Germany which we installed a year or so ago, and we've been working with it since," says Hambsch, adding that he is still tweaking it. "It uses a patented process with a catalyst and turbines to heat up the plastic, and we extract about 300 litres an hour of diesel fuel. We want to get 500 litres an hour."

It takes about 10 per cent of the diesel produced to drive the turbines that distill the plastic. Hambsch plans to use the balance of the diesel fuel to fire two one-megawatt generators at the site, creating electricity and making the operations self-sufficient. He adds that once the process is perfected, it can be duplicated and installed at other locations.

Recovery costs

The recovery process, however, is expensive.

Barrie Metals Group president Alfred Hambsch says that with metal prices soaring, it's now financially feasible to recover gold, silver, copper, aluminum and other metals from old electronics.

First, the electronic waste is stripped by hand to separate circuit boards, glass screens, plastic shells, wiring and other components. Then machines grind and shred the pieces, further separating them before sorting again by hand. The final piece are put into a giant centrifuge which spins them across a blade, further delaminating plastics to separate out metallic components.

The metals are taken to a smelter to be melted down and recovered, while the mixed plastics are ground to a sand-like consistency and fed into the diesel still. After extraction, the residue is an inert salt that is a fraction of the original volume of the plastic. So far, there's no use for the salt and it does go to landfill, but Hambsch is working on finding a market for it.

In addition to electronic junk, Hambsch also processes computers coming off lease from companies like Dell, sorting those destined for the junk pile and those which can be fixed and resold.

"I think e-waste is going to be the fastest growing business sector in North America," says Hambsch, a millwright by trade, who had a hand in designing all the equipment. "We're in talks with partners to set up our technology in Asia and Europe."

Demand outstrips supply

Once the metals and other useful material have been stripped away from the electronic waste, the remaining mixed plastics are ground to a sand-like consistency and fed into the diesel still, a machine that processes them back into their base hydrocarbons to create diesel fuel.

Environment Canada says in 2002 about 140,000 tonnes of computer equipment, phones, televisions, stereos and small appliances went to Canadian landfills — containing toxic material that included 4,750 tonnes of lead, 4.5 tonnes of cadmium and 1.1 tonnes of mercury. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency said in a report last year that in 2005 alone, between 1.9 to 2.2 million tons of electronics became obsolete and up to 90 per cent of that was sent to landfill.

Ironically, though, despite the abundance of electronic waste in the form of fax machines, copiers, computers, monitors, and old-style televisions which are being replaced by flat screens, Hambsch says his plant could handle more but is waiting on a unified e-waste collection program in Ontario which will see municipalities and others separate electronic waste from the landfill stream.

"Our wish is two 10-hour shifts a day, but we're not there yet," says Hambsch, who also operates recycling plants in Edmonton, Alta., North Carolina and Sacramento, Calif. New facilities are also under development in Dallas and a number of other U.S. states.

BMG's subsidiary, Global Electric Electronic Processing Inc. (GEEP), handles about 20,000 tonnes of waste a year through the Barrie plant, while its Edmonton facility runs at full capacity (30,000 tonnes). GEEP has 250 employees and its operations have about 60,400 square metres (650,000 square feet) of indoor processing and warehousing space, generating sales of more than $100 million a year.

While Barrie Metals Group gets a $700-per-tonne tipping fee from municipalities and others bringing obsolete equipment to his plant, what's missing in Ontario is legislation mandating the recycling of e-waste. Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Alberta already have such laws, and Hambsch says that's why the Edmonton plant is at capacity.

Barrie Metals Group subsidiary Global Electric Electronic Processing Inc. (GEEP), handles about 20,000 tonnes of waste a year through its plant in Barrie, Ont., while its Edmonton facility processes 30,000 tonnes.

Ontario is inching closer, says Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO), which filed its report March 31 to the Ontario government recommending how to handle the challenges of collecting 10 million computers, monitors and other peripherals tossed out each year and recycling the estimated 86.6 million tonnes of materials they contain.

The plan is to impose a levy for each piece of electronics, which would fund the $50 million a year costs of e-waste processing. This would allow the province to set up a network of drop off and collection points. (see related story.)

"We have a base of 96 collection points now," she says, adding that WDO is looking at expanding to as many as 500 collection points over the next five years. "That should create plenty of work for the recycling plants."

That makes good business sense to Hambsch.

"The commodity prices are good now," he says. "So it makes more sense to recover those metals, the gold, silver, copper, aluminum than to mine them from the ground."