New Life for Old PCs

Recycling: Spinning Garbage Into Gold

Thousands of PCs and printers sit piled on wooden pallets in a Silicon Valley warehouse, while workers sift through stacks of motherboards and peripherals, and industrial-size furnaces gorge on melting plastic and precious metals.

What might appear to be an electronic graveyard is actually a transition point for old systems that are on their way to a new life. United Datatech Distributors (UDT) in San Jose, California, isn't where old PCs necessarily come to die (though some will expire here). It's where they come to be reborn and resold--either as refurbished systems or as melted-down parts.

Creating the latter is a complicated process marked by hours of manual labor and mechanical sifting--for little return.

A five-year-old PC that cost $1500 to $2000 brand new is worth less than a buck when it's melted down, says Tom Hogye, UDT's director of sales and business development. PCs do contain precious metals--gold, silver, and copper--but the amount in one machine is negligible.

Even a ton of equipment yields only about 10 troy ounces of gold, 50 to 60 ounces of silver, and barely an ounce of platinum or palladium (a troy ounce, used for measuring gems and metals, weighs about 25 percent more than a regular ounce). The additional process of recycling the various types of plastic and lead-laden glass in PCs is also time-consuming and costly.

That's why UDT charges about $20 per PC to process machines (it works with businesses on volume and prefers not to receive single PCs from consumers). And it's why UDT, with permission from the discarding company, tries to refurbish or resell a system before recycling it. This is where the real value comes in.

Employees first test computers and peripherals for working parts, and set them aside for possible resale. The workers then disassemble the outer cases of useless machines, and they remove metal parts for melting. Lead and plastic are separated for pulverizing, too.

But the boards and circuitry are the real gold mine. Infrared heaters help remove integrated circuits, which can be resold to manufacturers. UDT had over $1.2 million worth of new and salvaged integrated circuits stockpiled when we visited.

One person's electronic garbage is a recycler's gold.