Every year globally we generate 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste and according to the US EPA less than 20% of that gets recycled and today we're gonna find out why we need to be doing a much better job. One compelling reason is that 70% of the toxic materials in our landfill are comprised of e-waste. I'm with Jason Johnson of Plasmid e-solutions and they're an Atlanta-based e-waste recycler. Why do we need to be doing a better job of recycling e-waste? We're talking about 70% of all toxic waste. Well some of the toxic waste you'll encounter in electronics are things such as nickel-cadmium batteries. That is a heavy metal. You could also look at things such as CRTs which are glass-screen televisions. There's about five pounds of lead in every television so it does make a great impact to recycle. So we're here at the charm facility in Atlanta, the center for harder recycle materials and this is just one location where you have a public drop-off that you come and collect. Charm is an excellent example of who we've partnered with to collect these materials. Some other examples would be like your local cities. We work with the city of Ra's well, Samarna, also keep North Fault and Beautiful Ampeach Trees City and so we hope to continue to partner with local cities so that we can recoup these electronics and keep them out of our community and our landfills. But we're actually going to head over to your facility now and take a look behind the scenes at what happens to all these materials after they're collected. So the staging floor is the first stop in your process for the e-waste. What what happens here? What we're looking for is materials that we either have to hand dismantle to remove things such as batteries like our PCs and we might also remove the hard drive in case someone wants to witness destruction. Also on this side of the warehouse we have our copiers and what we do with these is we're going to remove the toner before we shred them. And that is a big pile. What is all this? This is our e-waste that's ready for shredding. We brought it over here and we wanted to go through the material and make sure there's none of those items that we cannot shred such as LCD TVs, glass screen TVs, or batteries. So the next step of course is the shredder. Let's go take a look. At this point we've sorted all the material and that pile of material we bring it over here for our mechanical separation. Our first shredder does all the cutting, the heavy lifting of the operation. From there you're going to have two separate lines. One handles ferrous material such as steel or anything with iron content and the other line is going to handle things that are non-fers which has aluminum, copper, plastic, and any other things you may find in electronics. So we're here on the output side of the shred line. A magnet is pulling the ferrous materials out. That material ends up at the end of our ferrous line and so that magnet's pulled out all the steel. So what you have here is just your plastics wire aluminum and circuit boards. We've gone ahead and sized it into two distinctive fractions and that gives us optimal and efficient running at our classification line. What strikes me about the shredding process? In a way it's deconstruction but it's done in a more brute force way but that's what makes this business case for e-waste recycling work. It's pretty much only economical way and feasible way to recycle electronics at this capacity simply because if you were to try and demanufacture everything you wouldn't be able to keep up and be the cost would be a lot higher. So really what we're trying to do at our shred line is essentially demanufacture it and break it down and liberate the materials from each other so that when we go to our classification line that machine can sort everything out. You are doing some deconstruction of certain things with screw guns and smaller tools. For things such as CRTs, the glass screen TVs, or things that have a battery that we have to go ahead and open up and take the battery out of it. So let's go take a look at the classification line and see how this stuff is separated into commodities. So right the last section of your separation process here, the classification line. Well at this line what we're trying to do is separate out materials back into their raw components. We use metallic sensors to pull out things like copper stainless steel. We utilize an eddy current which alternates polarity to make aluminum literally jump off the end of a conveyor belt. What we end up with at the end is a clean plastic product that we can also send to someone that recycles plastic, converts into raw material and you may see it manufactured back into electronics or car parts, things of that nature. So what can a consumer do if they want it to recycle e-waste? Well you can look for a facility such as Toronto which handles the majority of the Atlanta area and then local cities usually have a recycling center and if your recycling center doesn't offer electronics recycling, I would encourage you to maybe talk to a council member or somebody at that recycling center to contact plasma solutions and we have various programs that we can work with cities to actually create a revenue stream at the local level and its job's creation for the city as well. These programs are not difficult to set up. I mean it's a container. You just got to have the space for it and a little extra know how how to manage these materials until you all come pick them up. When we run our weekly routes we can combine you in that route and combine, just pick up the electronics. It's very simple. If we look at the quantity of e-waste that we're dealing with and the fact that that's growing, I think we got to look at two sources of flame here, one being the consumer, you know we want new things and I think a lot of flame also applies with the manufacturers because they're designing things to be old or perceived to be old or to wear out in short order. So until we as consumers can convince manufacturers to make things last longer or design them to be cool longer, it's up to us to make sure that our e-waste gets recycled properly. Recycling your e-waste, that's just another easy way to be green. As always our challenge to you. Put your green on one leg at a time. Join the community by subscribing to our YouTube channel and help spread the green by liking our videos and sharing with your friends. GreenShorts.com that's short with a Z.