What happens to waste of electrical and electronic equipments

The discarded appliances are sorted by category and routed to specific grouping centers. Depending on their nature, they will be manually disassembled for their clearance and the different fraction obtained sent to adapted treatment plants for recycling and extracting of secondary raw materials that can be reused by the industry. That's how ferrous metals will be reused in the steel industry for casting steel used to manufacture a range of products that surround our daily lives. Copper, zinc, aluminum will be used to manufacture electronic components or cables.

Plastics will meet as master batches which are then molded or extruded in various of plastic pieces used in many applications ranging from automotive to decoration.

Some devices are subject to special treatments. Old fridges contain CFCs or Freon gases responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer. These greenhouse effect gases are extracted for their elimination. Polyurethane foam residues from refrigerators insulation are used to make a powder used especially by fire brigades as oil and other hydrocarbon absorbent.

The CRT monitors contain heavy metals such as strontium, barium or lead, worth to be transformed in raw materials.

Finally, in general, even if Ecotrel encourages the reuse of certain electrical and electronic equipment such as mobile phones or small devices, we avoid the reuse refrigerators, large white appliances and televisions that are often very inefficient compared with new appliances placed on the market by producers.