Patent ID: 7999012

Claim:
A method of recycling printer cartridges comprising: feeding the cartridges into a hopper; bathing the cartridges in a liquid while the cartridges are in the hopper; moving the cartridges from the hopper to a grinder with an infeed conveyor; passing the cartridges though a double curtain of the liquid while on the infeed conveyor; delivering the wet cartridges from the infeed conveyor to the grinder; grinding the cartridges while wetted by the liquid in the grinder; outputting the ground or shredded cartridges to an oscillating screen; rinsing and sorting the ground cartridges through the oscillating screen along with excess fluid to remove the excess fluid and to separate materials, fine materials that pass through the screen are delivered into a flotation tank which floats light weight materials, the floating light weight material is regularly skimmed into a storage container, larger and heavier materials are regularly dumped from the oscillating screen onto an outfeed conveyor; isolating floating materials from non-floating materials with a flotation separator in the floatation tank with sluice gates; removing larger materials from the floatation tank with the outfeed conveyor as well as other materials that sink to the bottom of the tank; transporting the larger and heavier materials to several material separators by the outfeed conveyor, water is dispensed if necessary along the outfeed conveyor, the larger material on the outfeed conveyor at this point is plastics, ferrous metal and non ferrous metal; and drying the remaining non metal materials and delivering to a suitable storage container.