Ten, eleven, twelve. Teymur Kalandar (57) has just turned on a coffee machine and is counting on his fingers how long the coffee grinder grinds. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The grinding stops.
“Wow, perfect,” says Kalandar, smiling broadly. He can tell by the sounds where the problem is with the coffee machine. At least not with the coffee grinder. “Above ten seconds is good.”
This fully automatic espresso machine with the brand name Philips, new value three hundred euros, was waste until a few minutes ago. At a long table, with boxes stacked on top and underneath, Kalander looks every day at broken returns from online stores and more and more waste from the recycling center. He works at Road2Work in Ede, which has been running a pilot for the past few weeks with eight recycling centers to repair electronic waste.
Kalandar has replaced the brew group, a part of the machine that forces hot water through the coffee, and is now testing whether the machine works again. “To know whether it is good coffee or not, you have to make espresso,” says Kalandar. He conjures a glass from a cupboard. The espresso starts to drip.
A fellow repairman is tasting, at a table behind him. “Strong,” is the conclusion. Eighteen people work in the hall on repairs, deleting all data on incoming devices, testing and sales. The hall is full of laptops, smart watches and headsets.
‘Typical bin from the recycling center’
“This machine was really easy,” says Kalandar, who trained as an architect in Iraq in his youth and has been working at Road2Work for a few years. The coffee machine goes on sale on the company’s website. Other devices go to specialized sites, for example for drones, or else to the local thrift store.
Often a repair is even simpler, says Kalandar. “Only a factory reset. The coffee grinder then only grinds for about six or seven seconds. People say: the machine is no longer good. They don’t reset it.”
Electrical equipment arrives at Road2Work from environmental squares.
Photo Olivier Middendorp
There is a large sorting hall next to the Road2Work repair area. A red forklift pushes iron containers delivered by trucks back and forth. “This is a typical bin from the recycling center,” says Erik Schalk, director at Road2Work, as he looks over a bin with vacuum cleaners, screens, amplifiers and speakers. “It’s all mixed up. That heavy microwave is on top of the rest. A piece of the side of that printer has now broken off. We can no longer repair it.”
People say: the machine is no longer good. But they don’t reset it
Schalk remembers the scene he saw when he was standing at the recycling center in Ede with a trailer of green waste. “Mother and son got out of a car, there was a large TV in the back. They had neatly put a belt around it. They lifted it out very carefully. And then at the container: one, two, three, throw.”
“How much fun is it to destroy something expensive?” says Schalk. But in his sorting center he sees the result: glass damage in TVs or lamps. Water from a kettle that has leaked everywhere. Containers that have been left outside and have been rained out. “Frying fat is the number one culprit. If it has run out of a deep fryer, we can throw away the entire box of equipment.”
Schalk was one of the initiators of the pilot, true for example, municipal waste services and electronics manufacturers also participate. The trial is running in eight recycling centers throughout the Netherlands, from Groningen to Weert. The goal is to save more products from electronic waste. “If we want to reuse more, we have to intervene in collection.”
‘Broken’ often works fine
Michele Riffaul (65), recognizable by his cap in rainbow colors, uses large hand gestures to point residents of Nieuw-Vennep to the correct waste container. He has worked in recycling centers for enough years that nothing surprises him anymore. Not about the many Dyson vacuum cleaners costing 400 euros that are delivered ‘broken’ when only the filter needed to be cleaned. Not about electronic waste that has nothing wrong with it at all.
Sometimes he has time for a chat. What’s wrong with your waste? It was just time for a new one, they say.
Michele Riffaul inspects the electronic waste. Right: the return point for devices participating in the pilot.
Photo: Olivier Middendorp
His recycling center is participating in the pilot to sort ‘possibly repairable’ devices from electronic waste and have it brought to Road2Work in Ede. Residents of Nieuw-Vennep are now asked at the gate whether they have items with them that are broken but suitable for reuse. They can take this to a special reuse point further down the street, where items for the local thrift store are also collected.
What’s wrong with your waste? It was just time for a new one, they say
“Good morning madam, can I help you?” Riffaul takes long steps towards a lady who approaches with a printer. “It’s malfunctioning,” the woman explains, “I can’t do anything with it anymore.”
The printer is received, but does not go to Ede. To keep things manageable for Road2Work, only products that are in high demand on the second-hand market and that are relatively easy to transport will first be considered. This concerns coffee machines, radios, tools, cameras, radios, vacuum cleaners and game consoles. The items are transported for the test in special containers so that they arrive undamaged.
Schalk talks in Ede about his ideal image, in which the recycling center helps them even more. That employees ask residents what is going on with their discarded electronics and record this in a central system. “Sometimes it is, for example: my father has passed away, his washing machine is ten years old but still works fine,” says Schalk. “We still have to test and clean the machine. But we know that no parts probably need to be replaced.”
Road2Work started selecting electronic waste for a second life in 2017. “That was not common at the time,” says Schalk. “You are now slowly seeing an increase in sorting centers keeping devices aside for repairs.”
For laptops, this is now being tackled almost factory-wide in Ede. The company repairs 30,000 per year, from recycling centers, but also returns and waste from companies. The process is divided into steps: one employee sorts, another clears data and repairs, the next does the testing. “Efficiency is the key,” says Schalk. “It makes a world of difference whether someone gets their hands on twenty devices of the same type in a row. This now works quite well with laptops and washing machines. We are now looking at: can we also scale up that experience and knowledge to other flows?”
A special waste point for reuse, possibly after repair, at the environmental square of Nieuw-Vennep.
Photo Olivier Middendorp
Waiting for the same Xbox
“Completely dead,” Kalandar says triumphantly. He just plugged an Xbox into his eighteen-socket power strip. The game console shows no signs of life.
Kalandar turns it over, rubs the back lovingly for a moment, and then unscrews the device within a few seconds. He sees a loose cable. To be sure, he also unscrews all the parts from the game console, until the Xbox is an empty black case, and then puts everything back with dancing fingers.
The game console turns on this time, but no image appears on the screen yet. “Damage on the NVMe drive,” Kalandar concludes, referring to a card on which files are stored. Repairing it would take at most half an hour, but it is not possible, because he first needs another ‘NVMe drive’ from an Xbox of exactly the same type. The Xbox therefore disappears under his desk until someone throws away exactly that type and the device finds its way to Kalandar’s desk.
The hall is full of devices with broken parts waiting for a similar device to pass by
For example, the hall is full of devices with broken parts that are waiting for a similar device to pass by. Ordering new parts is often not possible or makes the repair too expensive. Kalandar doesn’t care. “The more difficult, the more fun,” he says. “I don’t want a standard problem. I want to use my brain.”
Kalandar is a rare case, Schalk says in his office. He happily solders parts in or out of a device with his own hands. If he can’t get something repaired, he takes it home to try further. Just last weekend he found the defect in his son’s car with an infrared camera.
Many colleagues have a much more limited level of knowledge. “Half of our employees are at a distance from the labor market,” says Schalk. “We are trying to reintegrate that group. They often leave again after about three to six months. If we can completely chop the process into pieces, we can use them better. But we need many more devices for that. This pilot will help with that.”
Only if it is done efficiently is repairing financially attractive. “As long as it remains small-scale, it costs money.”
Schalk hopes that in the future people will look at their things from a different perspective. “Just because you no longer need it doesn’t mean it’s waste.” Everything, he says, in his office – the couches, conference table and chairs – is second-hand. “This table is not waste.” He points to a square wooden side table with a second-hand bowl of artificial flowers on it. “He was just looking for another place.”
SeriesNo waste
In the series No Waste NRC follows companies and initiatives that give products a new life, in order to save them from the waste mountain.