'60 Minutes': Cleaning up recycling Video
'60 Minutes': Cleaning up recycling Video Transcript
>> Tell me what we're looking at here?
>> Well, this is the manual disassembly of old, obsolete computers and monitors, TV's, anything with a circuit board get processed here.
>> So these guys are tearing it apart and everything's going into different bends. This is where the screen goes.
>> Well, it depends on...
>> Walk me around the circuit board.
>> Okay.
>> When you look at a circuit board what do you see?
>> Well, I see a lot of metal and a lot of plastic. Okay. This is out of a computer and this is a memory stick from a computer. Now, see this gold colored material on there?
>> Uh-hum.
>> That's gold. Okay. That really is gold. There's a lot of precious metal right here on this memory stick.
>> Precious metal, but toxic metal.
>> It can be, yes. Absolutely. ^M00:00:53 [ Sound effects ] ^M00:00:59
>> Well, there's a lot of lead in a typical CRT. If you look at a 17-inch CRT-based monitor with the glass tube that weighs about 20 pounds.
>> How much of that is lead?
>> Forty percent.
>> Forty percent of the twenty pounds is lead?
>> You're gonna be in the eight-pound range, about 8 pounds of lead.
>> Eight pounds of lead in a 17-inch CRT?
>> Yes.
>> And of course it's the CRTs that are getting recycled like crazy these days.
>> Right, right.
>> Because everybody is going to flat panels.
>> Absolutely.
>> We wanna see that the amount of glass that they're bringing in matches the amount of glass they're shipping to where they say they're shipping.
>> Why are you checking your vendors that way?
>> Well, it's important to us that the material that comes in here doesn't do anything to harm the environment.
>> John, some companies bulk ship these stuff to China.
>> Yeah.
>> Why don't you do that? It would be a lot cheaper.
>> Well, because we choose -- our philosophy is that the choice between poverty and poison should never be an option amongst people anywhere in the planet ^M00:01:59
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