Recycling Answer Sought for Computer Junk

By STEVE LOHR

Special to the New York Times

BELLEVILLE, N.J.-Eric Buechel tours his domain at a brisk pace, assessing his inventory with the pragmatic humor of an undertaker. In his warehouses sit rows of hulking computers, each weighing tons. They once whirred and flashed, but now they rest cold, unplugged, discarded.

"This is where mainframes come to die," Mr. Buechel declared, smiling and patting one of the big metal boxes with mercenary affection.

Mr. Buechel's company, Advanced Recovery Inc., is one of several offering entrepreneurial response to a looming environmental problem: millions of obsolete computers.

Byproduct of Efficiency
This unwelcome byproduct of the computer age, oddly, is the result of technology’s virtuous spiral-ever-lower prices for increasingly powerful machines. Consequently, American businesses and individuals are discarding their old mainframes, personal computers and work stations at a rate of more than 10 million a year.

Recognizing the problem, the computer industry and the Federal Government have begun collaborating to cope with this high-tech headache. A joint industry government study last month concluded that developing a "green work station"-one easier to upgrade or recycle than discard-is now "both a business and technological issue, not simply a mission for the environmentalist movement."

If the pace of discarding continues, some 150 million computer carcasses will reside in the nation's landfills by the year 2005, according to a Carnegie-Mellon University study. The disposal costs alone for the machines could be $1billion, ignoring the landfill space required-an acre of land dug to a depth of three and a half miles, room to stack about 15 Empire State Buildings end to end.

"The numbers are huge and it could be an enormous environmental problem," said Mark Greenwood, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pollution Prevention. "But we also believe that companies can make choices in the design and manufacture of computers that reduce the environmental impact, and open up great new areas for recycling."

Which is precisely the opportunity Mr. Buechel sees for Advanced Recovery, a twoyearold company that has become one of the nation's largest computerrecyclers. Business is booming.

Situated 10 miles west of Manhattan, the nine person company is handling 400,000 pounds of computers and other electronic gear a month four times the volume of a year ago. Mr. Buechel, the 34 year old president expects revenues to jump to $3 million this year, and he is looking for more space.

Outside the warehouse, there are piles of personal computers of every make and model, some clearly outdated but others just a few years old. ""A Hot machine one year is tossed out the next," Mr. Buechel said.

At Advanced Recovery, the castoff computers are pulled apart and mined for metals from aluminum to gold. The semiconductor chips are plucked out and sold to parts wholesalers and computer maintenance shops. But what can’t be resold is trucked away-and dumped in a nearby landfill.

The computer industry, now hoping to largely eliminate the landfill from the machines' life cycle, is proving a willing conscript to the green movement. Many of the industry's leaders grew up in the 1960's and 70's, reading the Whole Earth Catalogue and schooled in the tenets of environmentalism.

It is also an industry accustomed to change and attuned to international standards-and aware that Europe led by Germany, is taking some pioneering steps in recycling computers. The United States Government views the computer industry effort as a model of its new "Design for Environment" program in which business and government collaborate early to prevent pollution rather than having the E.P.A. be the cop that tries to catch corporate polluters after they have damaged the environment. This collaborative approach, along with stressing the competitive and marketing advantages of green products is to be a hallmark of the Clinton Administration. "And the computer industry is a very good partner," said Mr. Greenwood of the E.P.A.

Saving Electricity, Too
The industry's collaborative approach seems to have been a success on another environmental front: energy conservation. For more than a year, computer companies and the E.P.A. have worked to cut electricity consumption of desktop personal computers by half, by putting them in the electronic equivalent of hibernation when they are turned on but not being used. Prototypes, which deploy energy-saving chips and circuitry, were demonstrated last fall. The E.P.A. will begin issuing "Energy Star" logos for approved machines in June, and the machines are expected to be widely available by next year. Dozens of companies have signed up, including l.B.M., Apple,Compaq, Dell and Zenith Data Systems.

The E.P.A. estimates that converting the computer population to the Energy Star standards will result in an energy saving of 26 billion kilowatts annually by the year 2000. That amounts to the yearly electricity consumption of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine combined, said Brian Johnson, director of the Energy Star program. Viewed in terms of curbing pollution by reducing the volume of fuel burned, it is the equivalent of taking five million cars off the road.

But the mounting pile of obsolete computers remains the more difficult environmental challenge. An ambitious study of the problem completed last month by the Government and an industry consortium, " Environmental Consciousness:A Strategic Competitiveness Issue for the Electronics and Computer Industry,"sought to lay out the issues and serve as a guide for efforts by the computer companies, chip makers and others.

Design, Not Disposal
“The key is designing for the environment instead of trying to cope with environmental problems at the end of the pipeline-disposal," said Greg Pitts, the environmental project manager for the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, an industry consortium, which coordinated the study.

In pursuit of a green computer,, companies are beginning to work on different manufacturing processes, the use of recyclable materials, minimizing the amount of materials used and design changes so that computers can be easily taken apart for recycling.

In Research Triangle Park, N.C., J. Ray Kirby heads the International Business Machines Corporation's Engineering Center for Environmentally Conscious Products. For a year Mr. Krises’ team has worked on recycling the plastics used in l.B.M. personal computers. Plastics in old machines are coded bypolymer type and, starting this summer, Mr. Kirby plans to begin making housings and parts with a blend of recycled plastic and fresh resin.

"The goal we're working toward is to keep all l.B.M. products out of landfills," Mr. Kirby said.

‘It's Cost Avoidance'
Recycled plastic is cheaper than virgin resin, as long as collection, sorting and rendering of the old plastic can be done economically, Mr. Kirby notes. Another incentive for recycling, he says, is the prospect that companies are increasingly going to be held responsible for their old machines. "It's cost avoidance," he said. "Either you do something with it, or you're going to have to pay to take it away."

Starting next year, computer companies in Germany will be forced to reclaim their old machines when consumers no longer want them. The rule is partof the German "take back" law that applies this year to packaging of all types of products and next year will cover all electronics products,from hair dryers to mainframe computers.

There are several dozen computer-recycling companies in Germany, but it remains unclear whether there will be an efficient market for the machine dismantling, metals marketing and parts reselling that will result from the new law, according to German computer executives. If not, they say,the effect will be to increase costs to producers, who will then have to pass them along to consumers through higher prices.