How are 6 million pounds of electronics recycled?

Sims Lifecycle Services is one of the large e-recyclers in the United States and they use several large industrial shredders to recycle up to 6 million pounds of electronics per month. With their metal recycling process, The electronic waste they receive mostly comes from office equipment like laptops, computers, and phones.

Their last resort is recycling, but they attempt to reuse or repurpose it first. The first stop is the scale, where the weight is inputted into their data center and tagged with a bar code.


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The recycling facility is built primarily into two different sides, reuse on one side and recycle on the other.

On the “reuse” side, they manually remove all of the internal electrical components like motherboards, processors, and screens. The parts are cleaned, checked for proper functionality, and then sent back into inventory to be sold again. Big hard drives pulled from computers or servers are handled behind a higher security area with limited access. These hard drives are wiped of their data before being resold.

When electronics can not be reused, they are prepared for recycling on the other side of the electronics and metal recycling facility. The first step is “de-manufacturing”, which includes “de-packaging” and removing hazardous materials. The hazardous materials need to be removed before the electronics head to the shredder since the toxic materials could explode or cause damage to the environment.

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Sims Lifecycle Services is one of the large e-recyclers in the United States and they use several large industrial shredders to recycle up to 6 million pounds of electronics per month. With their metal recycling process, The electronic waste they receive mostly comes from office equipment like laptops, computers, and phones.

Their last resort is recycling, but they attempt to reuse or repurpose it first. The first stop is the scale, where the weight is inputted into their data center and tagged with a bar code.


Video Source

The recycling facility is built primarily into two different sides, reuse on one side and recycle on the other.

On the “reuse” side, they manually remove all of the internal electrical components like motherboards, processors, and screens. The parts are cleaned, checked for proper functionality, and then sent back into inventory to be sold again. Big hard drives pulled from computers or servers are handled behind a higher security area with limited access. These hard drives are wiped of their data before being resold.

When electronics can not be reused, they are prepared for recycling on the other side of the electronics and metal recycling facility. The first step is “de-manufacturing”, which includes “de-packaging” and removing hazardous materials. The hazardous materials need to be removed before the electronics head to the shredder since the toxic materials could explode or cause damage to the environment.

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