US Micro: E-waste recycling plant

The convention center where the CES 2012 is being conducted in Las Vegas draws the attention of consumers from across world. The show has all the latest devices including gadgets, technologies and many more that are sleek and shiny.

When you travel 10 miles towards the west going beyond the casinos, you will find a building which is as large as an airplane hanger. This is the final resting place of the old gadgets as they are refurbished here and are again sold. At times, devices are also stripped to their basic materials and then recycled into steel, precious metals and plastic.

This $20 million recycling plant was officially opened on Wednesday and it is the second one of its kind opened by US Micro Corp. Those products that are part of the modern age are also becoming unwanted thereby presenting an increasing threat.

The company's first firm was opened in 1995 in Atlanta and that time, the business of recycling the old electronics was a niche one. That period was the infancy for cell phones but now, its a fashion and getting a slicker one every year is the trend.

In 2011, US Micro has processed over 1 million products only with the first plant. With the second plant inaugurated yesterday, the company foresees to process about 1.5 million products in 2012. The company harvest the old electronics from the American companies and then disposes, refurbishes and resells over 90 % of them and recycles the rest.

There are two major concerns behind the growth of the electronics recycling industries. The first one if the dangers of the companies who have myriad devices to store the data and the second one is the awareness of the trouble caused by huge volumes of old devices.

The main aim of the US Micro is to focus on the threat that is posed by the unnecessary data on the credit cards, the numbers stored on the unwanted hard drives of the computers of leading banks, the legal documents in the memory of the fax and copy machines, memory cards, thumb drives and more.

The plant is also focused at preventing the e-waste from sullying the landfills in America as well as in China as the towns there have started to melt the circuit boards for extracting precious metals from them.

The e-waste recyclers have no legal standards and so they claim to responsibly dispose the gadgets but they actually sell them for low grade operations in developing countries like China and India, say the environmental watchdogs. The e-waste recyclers must first get accreditation from the respective bodies to verify their compliance which the US Micro claims it is pursuing now.