[ale] Off Topic, hard drive shredder

[planas]

Hi

On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 09:35 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote: 

> On 8/5/11 12:47 AM, Sparr wrote:
> > I've recently come into possession of a large security disintegrator,
> > designed for shredding things like hard drives and tapes and such. I'm
> > trying to figure out what to do with it. Selling it is, of course, an
> > option, but I was thinking of possibly starting up a small security
> > business to destroy hard drives for people. Is there a market for that
> > in Atlanta?
> It would make a big difference if your apparatus of mindless destruction 
> were mobile.  But you are going to have a waste stream like nobody's 
> business; some of that will be leaded solder, which is toxic.  One thing 
> you could certainly do without too much difficulty would be to separate 
> out the ground-up magnets; run the refuse past a piece of iron that gets 
> scraped off periodically.  I don't know what all the composition of disk 
> drive magnets would be in the field - I'd suspect samarium cobalt and 
> neodymium.  What you recover could potentially be press-formed into 
> fairly decent magnets, suitable for electricity generation, but as far 
> as actually separating out the metals into bulk material with a net 
> positive value, I dunno.
> 
> Possessing this device only makes sense if it's actively being used, so, 
> congratulations on having entered the waste processing business! :)
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Once you grind up the hard drive you could attempt to recover the metals
present using a combination of physical and chemical methods. The metals
should be a reasonable purity to sell .

If limited metal recovery is done you probably will have D- series
(unless the EPA has a specific classification) hazardous waste. I do not
know the current prices for hazardous waste disposal. But when I was
handling waste disposal I found there was roughly a 10x difference
between the charges of non-hazardous waste and a hazardous waste.

Off topic stupidity, most people do not realize that fluorescent lights
should be disposed as a hazardous waste - mercury is the culprit.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com
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