The automatons digging for hidden gold in discarded TVs.
Ever wondered what happens to your old television? As TV technology advances, we are upgrading more often and in the UK two million sets are thrown away each year.
Discarded electrical goods are the fastest growing form of waste, with TVs making up the biggest element – and that’s a huge headache for the councils that have to deal with it.
But as I found out on a trip to a recycling plant at Bridgnorth in Shropshire, there is also a growing opportunity to extract value from all of these outdated televisions. It turns out that there is gold buried in used sets – literally – and if you can recycle them efficiently there is money to be made.
The plant, run by the French water and waste group Veolia, is going to process 300,000 televisions a year, collected from council dumps across the country. Two robots have just been installed to speed up the process.
The first automates the tricky job of removing the plastic casing from the screen without breaking it, the second deals with a health and safety problem by cutting and sealing the LCD light tubes that contain mercury.
Source: Robot recycling – extracting value from old TVs – BBC News
