Ecotech Services now accepts surgical face masks for recycling.

• less than five are accepted as part of our $5 drop off/minimum fee;
• more than five are $1.00 per five;
• large volumes of compressed masks (greater than 0.001m³ – 10 x 10 x 10cm) are $30 per 0.001m³.

This service is only available at our Christchurch premises.

Polyproylene are the only type accepted at this stage.

The face masks are recycled by TerraCycle.

Lincoln Envirotown is holding a repair cafe event on Saturday the 4th of December from 10am to 1pm.  As well as bikes and clothing repairs to appliances, computers, and anything else that is electrically powered will be offered.

Ecotech Services will be helping out.

As a means of promoting the repair industry Ecotech Services is once again offering free repairs or evaluation to a wide range of faulty electrical, electronic and computer equipment on the 2021 International Repair Day.

The event will be held at our premises on Saturday the 16th of October between 8:30am and 5:00pm at 139A Wordsworth St in Sydenham, Christchurch.

The free repair offer does not include any parts that may be needed and if time is limited the repairs may not be completed. The repairs will be carried out by experienced technicians and where needed will be carried out by registered electrical workers.

I sent this reply to an email that we received from one of our customers.  Thought I would share it because there is a lot of good info here.

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Some of the answers to your questions are on our recycling processes page.

At this stage the countries that Ecotech Services is directly involved with in is only Australia.  Our downstream recyclers would be sending processed e-waste to a number of countries.  Note that exporting e-waste is covered by the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal as well as a few other international agreements.  The countries that our downstream recyclers export to is documented on the EPA website.

We use reputable, well established organisations for downstream recycling and we expect that they comply with relevant legislation.  I have anecdotal evidence from about fifteen years ago that e-waste was likely to have been exported illegally.  I recently asked for auditing and compliance information from our downstream recyclers and the information was either not available or not forthcoming.

To answer your question as to where it all ends up is difficult to answer since the reverse supply chains for recycled materials is probably as long as those for the initial manufacturing of the items.  

The items we receive are either refurbished, stripped for parts, or stripped of recyclable material.  Items and recovered material are then sold with the waste going to landfill.

At present we do not have any external auditing of our processes.  It is too expensive, not required, and takes time and finances away for the actual task of minimising the environmental impact of e-waste.  See our  auditing and certification pages.

It is impossible to give a definitive and quantitative answer to your question.  To give an answer even approaching a worthwhile analysis would mean that we would have to either have a volume of e-waste that is simply not available to us at present (or indeed the whole industry) or we would have to charge our customers a ridiculously high price to recycle the e-waste

As you can see from the matters described above you simply cannot do an accurate full lifecycle analysis of your equipment.  In my opinion doing a full lifecycle analysis of e-waste in New Zealand at present is not a worthwhile exercise.

Ecotech Services occasionally gives equipment to groups and individuals to dismantle to foster education about technology and the environment.  We recently gave some equipment to the St Martins Scout group.  Here is a report and photo from Alex Head, the St Martins Scout Group Cub Leader.

The St Martins Cubs group were excited to learn about electronics while disassembling electrical goods including speakers, computers, DVD drives and more. The cub group comprised of 50 children aged between 8-11 years of age, who over two separate nights, took apart and sorted the electronics and computers into five different components, cables, circuit boards, plastics and non ferrous and ferrous metals.

The children, under supervision by the St Martins Cub leaders loved the challenge of discovery, working together in their Sixers groups, they solved the puzzle of how to undo and take apart the goods, and delighted in the exploration of circuits boards and the gold and silver within.

The educational aspects included learning about the different metals, ferrous and non ferrous, where circuit boards go to be recycled and understanding the role we can all play in environmental protection by correctly repairing or repurposing and disposing of electrical goods.

Special thanks to Ecotech Services who provided over 50 broken electrical goods, enough for one item per child, and educated the Scout leaders to make this possible. I learned a lot and we certainly hope to be able to assist in future to help prevent many of these components from ending up as landfill.

UPDATE (November 2021):  We are now offering television repairs again but there should be an expectation that in some cases the repairs may be uneconomical.

Due to the difficulties that are often encountered Ecotech Services no longer offers to repair televisions, with the exception of those that have a CRT display.

The difficulties are due to a number of factors including expensive or unavailable spare parts, delays in getting spare parts from abroad, the proliferation of cheap second hand units, and the high incidence of the commercially uneconomical repairs to units with backlight failures.

We still offer our television recycling service and still sell refurbished ones.