Cathode ray tube recycling

Lead and polybrominated flame retardants are the two hazardous materials th at can be found in electronic appliances. Particularly, cathode ray tubes ( CRT) contain leaded glasses. In a computer monitor, over 98% of the lead is in the CRT. This material is generally not accepted for reuse as a compone nt; only those from televisions can be reused. However, this currently repr esents only a very small market. Envirocycle (a US company) has developed a process to recycle all glasses contained in CRTs; this process includes cl eaning and sorting glass. The product obtained is used for the manufacture of new CRT glass. Some industries have used pulverized glass from CRTs in s melting processes as slagging material instead of sand or slag. In this pap er, some environmental issues related to the recycling of computers and tel evision sets, and CRTs from computers are presented and discussed. Differen t processes used to recycle CRTs are described along with an economic analy sis. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.