Nolan’s Notes: Finding Your Sweet Spot
Standard of Excellence: Delivering Excellence—A Daily Goal
Knocking Down the Bone Pile: Tin Whisker Mitigation in Aerospace Applications, Part 3
A Greener, Money-saving Approach to Dealing with Waste
August 5, 2015 | Steve Burns, Conecsus LLCEstimated reading time: 6 minutes
Figure 2: Conecsus custom alloy ready for resale.
Gregory Bryant, Facility EHS for the Huntsville Facility, says, "Working with this new process changed everything. We no longer had to ship our materials as before at great cost; instead, they (Conecsus) send a truck to pick it up. We pay a nominal processing fee. Sanmina receives payment for the metals in return, that is often significantly greater than the original processing costs. The most important thing is that we are reusing, not disposing. It’s not only in keeping with Sanmina's 'green' objectives, but it changes the way that Sanmina may be classified or regulated. We have to maintain our 'Large Waste Generator' classification due to the multiple waste streams that we produce. But in our medical operations for example, fully 98% of the wipes we dispose of are now non-hazardous solid waste, recycled by pyrolizing and then used as a reagent to process our dross."
Greg says that this year alone (2015), up until the end of March, up to 1,500 lbs. of waste had been shipped, with a savings of thousands of dollars in hazardous material processing charges. "It has saved us a tremendous amount of money," he adds. "Conecsus refines the material and sells the metals on the global market. They don't return it to us; they simply pay us for it. The wipes and contaminated materials don't generate metals of any value, their value is in being turned to carbon and used as a reagent to recover the metals in our dross; that’s really where the money comes from."
And all of this is done with the approval of ADEM, something that they never thought they would obtain.
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