Status of Retroworks de Mexico

Can E-Stewards identify these parts in a computer?  Hand dis-assembly of CDROM drives yields motors, lasers

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I opened the partnership in Sonora Mexico in 2007, establishing a "maquila dora" company, managed by a women's collective.  Next week I will be travelling there to meet with researchers from Memorial University of Newfoundland, who have won a $469,000 five year grant to vet "fair trade recycling", using RDM as a model.

We will also have a WR3A Board meeting in Phoenix at the Refurbishers Summit, I will post a link.  In the past I was able to edit and post drafts waiting in the draft box during my early hotel mornings, and I have several that I enjoy despite awkward interruptions in the writing process.

The November issue of Scrap Magazine will have some photos of our first trial of CRT cullet (generated in Mexico) used as a fluxing agent at the local mining smelter; we have shipped two loads, and it looks promising.



Below is copper stripped by hand.  Not by fire.  We dismantly floppy disk drives by hand, hard drives by hand, generating magnets and copper and pure aluminum heat sinks.   The machines which shred material don't do that great a job of identifying parts useful in the reuse market, and the 20 percent we reuse is worth 80 percent of the revenue.

But yes, we are also self-sufficient in CRT glass.   We have our own market.  We get lots of calls from other people with big piles asking us to help them with their CRT glass headache.   Many of these piles are generated at plants in California, which turned down our proposals to allow reuse and hand disassembly.