HP Innovation Journal Issue 14: Spring 2020 | Page 52

Tania Damaso says
she enjoys the fact
that the work she does
every day contributes
to environmental
conservation. “I like that
every time we have our
meetings, we talk about
recycling,” she says.
Other cartridges are shredded, rather than disassembled,
by a giant shredding machine, whose blades break them
into small pieces. A tank full of water begins the process
of sorting the materials. Lighter plastics and foam float,
while heavier plastics and metals sink. The disassembly
process has improved the ability to recover more of the
original cartridge plastic by 50%, compared with the
standard shred-and-sort method, Zimmer says.
screwdrivers, and other tools, employees take out
batteries and parts that can’t go into the building’s own
shredder. Materials are then separated with a sink-float
mechanism, among other processes. Large, blue metal
machines with nicknames—Heidi, Ginger, Otto, and
Sally—do much of the work.
“If you were to smash a cartridge into tiny pieces and
then try to pick the plastic or metal out of it, you can
think about how inefficient that would be, rather than
disassembling it,” she says. “You’ll have more intact
pieces in order to find good recycling solutions for all
the materials.” All of the plastic retrieved from the two locations is then
shipped to a facility in Montreal run by the La Vergne
Group. The recovered cartridge plastics are combined with
other recycled material such as bottles and clothes hangers.
The Canadian company reformulates the chemistry of the
material, turns the plastic into pellets, and sends the raw
material back to HP, which uses it to make new products
that could eventually end up back at La Vergne.
Across the street, used hardware from HP and other
brands arrives by the truckload into receiving docks,
where the items are weighed and registered. Then
comes the manual deconstruction phase. With drills, HP estimates that, in some cases, the same plastic moves
through the Tennessee facility about a dozen times. “It can
keep on going around the circle,” says Ingrid Sinclair, global
president of Sims Recycling Solutions. “There is no end to it.”
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 14