Friday, November 16, 2012
What about recycling...?
Millions of monitors and
flat-screen TVs will be soon at the end of their useful life or maybe they will
become obsolete, so they would become a threat to the environment. This
situation brings a very serious problem to the world, because we already have
mountains and mountains of technological waste in the world. However, there is
a group of researchers that are developing a set of tools to help recycling
these devices in an efficient way. The LCDs that were created before 2009
use fluorescent lighting cold cathode bulbs to light the screens. These screens
also contain mercury, and that is why it is so difficult to incinerate them or just
throw them to a rubbish dump. During the following years, is estimated that
billions of these screens will be retired of service every year. A professor at
the Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States, called
Fu Zhao, who is also one of the researchers, warns that if those screens are
not properly treated, they may cause a serious damage in the environment. Furthermore,
Fu Zhao and some of his students are elaborating a system to help the recycling
industry to provide an appropriate treatment to these screens. The objective is
to produce the tools and the equipment specially designed to disassemble LCDs
within an acceptable labor cost and, at the same time, to recover the most
expensive materials included in the screens to reduce the environmental risks.
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