System upgrade: Dale Johnson and MaSeR bring a new degree of separation to electronics recycling

Recycling Today, Oct, 2005 by Brian Taylor

Advances in recycling, sorting and separating technology have been a part of the competitive landscape for decades.

When a new system is deployed, it can be both a source of pride and anxiety for those who own it as well as a source of curiosity and concern for those who don't.

Such is the case with the new system installed by MaSeR (Materials Separation and Recovery) Corp. at its Barrie, Ontario, Canada, facility. The recycling and separating system brings &lamination technology, developed in Europe and acquired by MaSeR, to the North American electronics recycling industry for the first time.

The desired result will be improved recovery efficiency for electronics component materials, including copper, precious metals, aluminum, steel and plastics.

BEYOND SHREDDING. At first glance, MaSeR's Barrie facility is reminiscent of other existing electronics shredding plants.

The front end of the plant consists of a series of shredding and initial sorting devices that liberate and remove ferrous materials and some plastics while also downsizing the remaining materials.

At this point, however, the MaSeR process departs from traditional recycling technology. After this preparation phase, the downsized particles of materials (this portion of the stream can include pieces of circuit boards, hard drives and miscellaneous fastened pieces) head to MaSeR's Fractionater[TM] for delamination.

In this phase, materials bound together during the manufacturing process by lamination and with fasteners are physically separated for higher-value recycling.

After the Fractionater works its delamination magic, the mix of un-bonded constituent materials is segregated by size and then recovered through a series of sieves and fluid-bed separators that yield three desirable, recyclable commodities: aluminum choppings and powder; mixed copper and precious metals choppings and powder; and mixed plastics.

A selling point for MaSeR is that the process it uses ensures secure data destruction. By delaminating the cobalt-chromium plating from the aluminum platters in hard drives, the data-bearing medium is separated from the platter, and all the information stored on drives is eliminated.

MaSeRs executive team says this destruction process exceeds the capabilities of traditional data security techniques, including hard drive over-writing, de-gaussing and shredding, while also ensuring on the environmental front that the process does not involve burning, exporting or landfilling residual materials.

MaSeR's Barrie plant consists of two production lines set up within the company's 46,000-square-foot space. Each line is designed to process up to 40 million pounds of electronic scrap annually. The stream can be varied, but certain portions of the electronic scrap stream are unwelcome.

HELPFUL SCREENING. Most electronic scrap processed by MaSeR has been triaged by an electronics recycler prior to its shipment to MaSeR.

Any saleable units or parts have already been recovered and hazardous components have been removed. MaSeR does not accept monitors or other CRT (cathode ray tube) devices, as the system is not suited for processing glass. Customers are also asked to remove batteries, power packs and other potentially hazardous substances so they do not enter the processing stream.

Beyond those exceptions, computers, peripherals, circuit boards, power cords and other electronic scrap can be processed together and with minimal prior disassembly in a system that yields recyclable steel, aluminum, copper, precious metals and mixed plastic scrap.

KNOWING THE MARKET. MaSeR, with headquarters offices in Marblehead, Mass., is not a ship being steered by a novice crew. Co-founder, President and CEO Dale Johnson and cofounder and advisor Michael Magliaro are veterans of the electronics industry, and earlier this year the company added another electronics recycling veteran as its executive vice president in the form of Lauren Roman.

Johnson learned the electronics industry during his years as executive vice president of Manufacturers' Service Limited (MSL), a global contract electronics manufacturing firm that went public in 2000 and was acquired by a Toronto-based Celestica Inc. in 2004.

After departing MSL, Johnson decided to call upon his background in electronics manufacturing to conduct research into the computer repair, refurbishment and recycling industry, with an eye on identifying best practices for a future business endeavor. During this process, he met Magliaro, co-founder of D.M. Electronics Recycling Corp. (DMC), which at one time was one of the largest electronic scrap recycling companies in North America. Magliaro also later co-founded Lifecycle Partners, an electronics asset management company based in Merrimack, N.H., that is one of MaSeR's strategic partners.

Johnson and Magliaro founded MaSeR in 2002 after being convinced that the Fractionater materials separation process developed in Europe could successfully be used to recycle electronic scrap and other difficult to recycle composite materials.