Recycling

October 23, 2017

This week I replaced my home PC. It had died the week before and I couldn’t fix it.

The computer was an ex-business Dell and had lasted me a good 5 years, with just one fan replaced in that time. I’ve swapped in another ex-business PC and hopefully will get another 5 years from that. They work out at about £25 a year which is pretty good going.

As with most electrical items that break in my home it got taken apart. This is partly to see how they are made and Dell desktops typically have lovely engineering. But also to see what parts can be reused.

This is how the parts broke down:

• Case fans, memory, heatsink – off to a mate who builds his own PCs.
• Motherboard and power supply board – off for specialist recycling, my mates all pool their old PCBs and then get enough for a few beers each time a big collection is made.
• Smaller heatsink, standoffs, screws, SATA cable, mini speaker with built in amp, springs, other cables – kept for my projects
• DVD ROM – To be sold on eBay.
• Steel case parts – Recycling
• Plastic case parts – Recycling
• Hard disk – Kept for the moment but will likely get melted down with the PCB off for recycling.

Recycling in the news

Recycling of plastics has been in the news a lot lately, China is cutting back on imports of waster plastics. Given that they’ve been getting dirty nappies mixed in with their plastic bottles, you can hardly blame them.

Julia Bradbury got into a Twitter flame war over her comments on plastics.

Bullshit!13m tonnes LEAK into the oceans e/yr,  80% of the plastic in the seas comes from litter originally dropped in our towns and cities https://t.co/oewGlLIHEX

— Julia Bradbury (@JuliaBradbury) October 17, 2017

The IET spotted that most people don’t undertand why recycling is a good thing.

To help raise awareness Claire Potter is making art from marine waste.

By Andy from Workshopshed One Comment

  Posted in: Recycling