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ASIAN INNOVATION AWARDS: BRONZE Metal Muncher This machine chews up TVs, videos and other electrical goods and spits out a pile of recycleables in seconds By David Kruger/OTAWARA, TOCHIGI PREFECTURE Issue cover-dated October 18, 2001 TAKAO HISAZUMI likes to keep things simple. When Matsushita Electric Industrial asked the senior engineer to come up with an economical and efficient way to recycle its products, he did just that. His Parts Separator System may not be the most imaginatively named invention, but he is excited about its energy and cost savings. The machine uses only a fraction of the power traditional industrial recycling machines consume. The system not only runs more cheaply than other machines, but at ¥18.5 million ($155,000) it's also about 80% less expensive than other recycling systems. Matsushita is not a recycler by nature. But like all other electronic-goods makers in Japan, since April it has been responsible for dealing with some of its products after customers discard them. The home-appliance recycling law makes manufacturers responsible for the recycling of televisions, air-conditioners, refrigerators and washing machines. Hisazumi and two other engineers spent two years developing and testing their system before deploying machines around the country. In Otawara, Tochigi prefecture, about 150 kilometres north of Tokyo, Nakadaya Corp. is using one of the machines to recycle televisions. The law states that makers must recycle 55% of each machine by weight, so the Parts Separator System focuses on the machines' printed-circuit boards, which vary in weight from 2.5 kilograms to about 15 kilograms. The circuit boards account for about 11% of an average TVs' weight and when combined with the screen easily surpass the 55% minimum. As the name implies, Hisazumi's machine goes one step further than traditional product-disposal machines, such as crushers or cutters, which were designed with the primary aim of ensuring old products took up as little space as possible in landfill sites. At the Nakadaya factory the printed circuit boards are fed into a steel cylinder. At the bottom of the cylinder is a four-pronged propeller that spins at high speed, driving the boards against and up the sides of the cylinder. The boards then crash against four pins placed around the cylinder at varying heights and are crushed into pieces of varying size. The separator can also deal with whole products. It takes just 10 seconds to demolish a videocassette recorder, for example. The remains of the products are poured from the cylinder onto a sorting device. Aluminum, iron, copper and plastics are separated based on their magnetic properties. Hisazumi says it took months of trials and testing to determine the optimum positions and angles for the pins in the cylinder. There is a patent pending on the cylinder design. The payoff from all the testing? A degree of separation that
makes the final remains of sufficient purity to interest mineral
reprocessing companies. No ResultsPlease supply at least one search term. Advertise on feer.com and in FEER |
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