The Shredder: Where Your Computer Goes to Die

Image: CarbonNYC

We all love our computers, right? But what happens to them when we stop loving them? There are three big possibilities:

1. The landfill: Like it or not, throwing stuff out is easy. Even though electronics are full of glass, heavy metals, and even precious metals like gold and silver, most of them get kicked to the curb when they reach a certain age, only to rot in a landfill for an eternity.
2. The closet: If you’re like me, you probably have a closet, basement, or garage full of old zip drives and 2x cd burners that you at first thought might be useful again, but now you’re just too lazy to get rid of.
3. The recycling center: Electronics recycling isn’t exactly a booming practice, but little by little manufacturers are beginning to offer return programs and local governments are starting to offer electronics recycling pick points.

We all know what happens to our once-loved computer in options 1 and two, but what about option 3? For years now, electronics recycling has been a rather simple task: you collect old electronics and, by hand, strip out what you want and just throw the rest out. This allows “recyclers” to take whatever useful parts or materials are easily extractable and resell them, but it doesn’t do much about the huge stream of junk filling our landfills.

And that’s where e-Scrap Destruction steps in. Instead of picking through a sea of used electronics looking for gold and throwing the rest out, e-Scrap sends everything through a huge, specially designed shredder that tears the waste to pieces, where electromagnets can remove iron and then rest can be further pulverized and sorted into useful bits.

Because of the company’s zero waste to landfill policy, you can be sure that they’re not just throwing anything out. Everything that comes through their door is torn down and sent out for further processing to eventually be reused in other commercial applications.

Worried about your data? Well, don’t be. Because everything that comes in goes through their custom electronics shredder, nothing is left behind. This has been one of the biggest concerns with electronics recycling, but e-Scrap has done a great job to put down those fears by thoroughly destroying any remnants of salvageable data.

So, what’s going to happen to your next computer when you get tired of it?

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