What happens to the Cathode Ray Tube taken from your old TV set or computer monitor?
Planet Green endeavours to reuse, recycle or reprocess every part of your screen.
After careful dismantling, the plastic carcass surrounding your screen is recycled using established routes. The metallic components, e.g. copper yoke, shadow mask and circuit boards are stripped away and sent for precious, ferrous and non-ferrous metal recovery.The rear of the tube containing the leaded funnel and neck glass is separated from the lead free panel glass , ensuring no cross contamination of the two different glass types. The Panel has the phosphor coating removed and is separately treated leaving a clean glass ready for reuse.The leaded glass is crushed and processed in our electrolytic converter. The process results in two distinct re-usable streams of clean, molten glass and lead. Both can be immediately re-used as valuable raw materials with no further processing.
Other CRT recyclers are reliant on export.
Option 1 - Exported leaded glass is used to make new CRT screens.
This is described as ‘glass to glass’ or ‘closed loop’ recycling.
Whilst reuse is to be encouraged there are two formidable long-term problems:
- The sheer quantity of glass is already higher than demand.
- The introduction of flat screen technology is creating a declining market for CRTs, leaving a glut of leaded glass that needs to be treated.
Option 2 - Metal smelting.
Disadvantages:
- Recovers only 50% of the lead whilst producing a contaminated toxic slag that is either used as landfill or low value aggregate.
- High transportation costs.
- Demand outstripping site capacity.
- Nearest operator is in Belgium.
These 2 glass recycling methods relocate our problem; they do not eliminate it.