Word: plasticizers
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...that passes for a kitchen, two paraffin burners sit on the dirt floor alongside the month's food: four cabbages, a bag of oranges and one of potatoes, three sacks of flour, some yeast, two jars of oil and two cartons of milk. Next to a dirty stack of plastic pans lies the mealy meal and rice that will provide their main sustenance for the month. A couple of bars of soap and two rolls of toilet paper also have to last the month. Tsepho has just brought these rations home from the social-service center where the "orphan grants...
...hand and metal tweezers in the other, they pry silicon chips from circuit boards like dentists extracting little metal teeth. Down the hall, a jumble of bright green motherboards spills out onto a conveyor belt headed toward a shredder that will rip them to cracker-size pieces of plastic. And around the corner, a clean-cut guy in a black work smock takes a big hammer and smashes one hard drive after another before tossing them into a huge bin marked ALUMINUM...
...gold mine. Pentium and other processors have golden tips. A computer's main circuit board, fashioned from copper and fiber glass, is studded with silver and gold connectors. A steel frame keeps the unit sturdy, and aluminum or copper heat sinks prevent the cpu from overheating. The outer plastic case can be recycled to make everything from pothole filler to pencil holders. Even the cords dangling from the back have rich copper wiring that can be reincarnated as pipes, pans or furniture...
When components are too old to be salvaged, IBM ships them to specialists in plastic, metals and glass. At Envirocycle, which does monitors, the plastic cases are popped open, the power cables chopped off and the circuit boards removed. Next the glass is crushed into pieces and stripped of various coatings so it can be sent to monitor makers that will re-form the rubble into new displays. MBA Polymers in Richmond, Calif., feeds whole keyboards and joysticks into its machines. The metals get siphoned off, then the plastic is melted into tiny pellets, which are resold...
...screws are being replaced with snap-open panels for quicker dismantling. Lead solder used to fasten parts to circuit boards is giving way to safer tin, silver and copper alloys. Spray-on flame retardants, which can be toxic when recycled, are being replaced with metal paneling. And those annoying plastic shipping peanuts are being replaced with packing material made of water-soluble starch...