[ale] Off Topic, hard drive shredder

[Charles Shapiro]

Argh.  I realize all too well that flourescents are hazardous waste. The
problemo is that there is no simple way for a private individual to get rid
of them legally.

-- CHS


On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 11:42 AM, planas <jslozier at gmail.com> wrote:

> **
> Hi
>
>
> On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 09:35 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
>
> On 8/5/11 12:47 AM, Sparr wrote:
> > I've recently come into possession of a large security disintegrator,
> > designed for shredding things like hard drives and tapes and such. I'm
> > trying to figure out what to do with it. Selling it is, of course, an
> > option, but I was thinking of possibly starting up a small security
> > business to destroy hard drives for people. Is there a market for that
> > in Atlanta?
> It would make a big difference if your apparatus of mindless destruction
> were mobile.  But you are going to have a waste stream like nobody's
> business; some of that will be leaded solder, which is toxic.  One thing
> you could certainly do without too much difficulty would be to separate
> out the ground-up magnets; run the refuse past a piece of iron that gets
> scraped off periodically.  I don't know what all the composition of disk
> drive magnets would be in the field - I'd suspect samarium cobalt and
> neodymium.  What you recover could potentially be press-formed into
> fairly decent magnets, suitable for electricity generation, but as far
> as actually separating out the metals into bulk material with a net
> positive value, I dunno.
>
> Possessing this device only makes sense if it's actively being used, so,
> congratulations on having entered the waste processing business! :)
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing listAle at ale.orghttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists athttp://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>  Once you grind up the hard drive you could attempt to recover the metals
> present using a combination of physical and chemical methods. The metals
> should be a reasonable purity to sell .
>
> If limited metal recovery is done you probably will have D- series (unless
> the EPA has a specific classification) hazardous waste. I do not know the
> current prices for hazardous waste disposal. But when I was handling waste
> disposal I found there was roughly a 10x difference between the charges of
> non-hazardous waste and a hazardous waste.
>
> Off topic stupidity, most people do not realize that fluorescent lights
> should be disposed as a hazardous waste - mercury is the culprit.
>
>   --
> Jay Lozier
> jslozier at gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20110805/5ac002d1/attachment.html