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Brampton, Ont. — Bob Brodie approaches his work as a surgeon does, but this is no operating room.
Inside a cinderblock warehouse near the Toronto airport, he is pulling tools from the wall and arranging them into careful rows on the table in front of him. First the pliers, which are good for cutting, screwdrivers, which can be used as blunt objects if necessary, and a high powered drill to open up the carcass.
This is how you tear apart a television set. Minutes from now, he'll be ripping out the tangled insides of an old TV and tossing them into a nearby bin.
Mr. Brodie is a professional dismantler of electronics, which means if the gadget has a plug, he can reduce it to pieces faster than most people can turn it on.
Shift supervisor Bob Brodie of SIMS Recycling in Brampton, Ont., disassembles a computer monitor to remove toxic materials
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This particular TV, a 27-inch Sharp, isn't causing any problems — which is good because he must work quickly.
We are standing in one of the few facilities in Canada capable of safely disposing of old televisions, an electronics recycling plant operated by Sims Recycling. Most discarded TVs end up in landfills, and many are sent to developing countries by junk wholesalers who gather them in bulk and export them to Nigeria and India, where they are harvested for scraps of copper, often by low-paid workers in dangerous conditions.
It is the unseemly side of the global boom in flat panel LCD and plasma television sales: what to do with all those old tube TVs that are suddenly out of fashion.
For Mr. Brodie, it is a race against time.
"The best," he says, not looking up from his tools as he talks, "can do one of these in about minute-and-a-half."
That sounds fast. But in the 90 seconds it takes, an average of 58.4 new flat panel sets will be produced in China, the world's biggest TV manufacturer.
Many will be sent to Canada, where more than a million new televisions were bought this year. Only one in four Canadian homes has a high-definition set today, which means the market is far from being exhausted.
DANGEROUS WASTE
Reaching into the TV carcass, Mr. Brodie yanks out the heavy cathode tube. On the back is the yoke — a twisted mass of copper wire, the neurons of the TV. It makes a cracking sound as he twists it off.
The glass tube houses eight pounds of lead, which protects couch potatoes from radiation. Cradling it like an egg, he walks to a nearby crate and sets it gently inside. It will be trucked to New Brunswick for smelting.
If the tubes break, they are considered toxic waste because of the lead, and shipping becomes more costly. They clink together like wine glasses but don't crack.
The yoke, meanwhile, is destined for Quebec where the copper is worth a few dollars once smelted.
But it's not only the tubes that are treated with caution. Some newer TVs contain mercury that must go to Pennsylvania for disposal.
Even the smallest components pose hazards: Beryllium is sometimes used to make copper stronger, and particles of this carcinogen can escape into the air if those pieces are shredded.
Workers here are tested regularly to ensure there are no trace amounts in their blood.
CLUNKY SPACE HOGS
The shift to high-definition TVs is often compared to the advent of colour, which made millions of sets obsolete.
Today's old TVs are becoming hard to get rid of. They are clunky space hogs that draw waning interest in the second-hand market. Internet sites such as Craigslist often carry ads for free TVs, as long as the new owner is willing to haul the beast away. Even charities, burdened by junk, have started refusing them, leaving consumers searching for recyclers, or throwing them away.
No one knows exactly what happened to most of the black and white TVs when the world went colour, but Geoff Rathbone, head of waste management for the City of Toronto, figures it's no great mystery.
If geologists dug up a landfill from the 1960s, they would probably find a layer of them crusted into the earth. It would be like uncovering fossils from our electronic past. Behold … Panasonic Rex! "Televisions have been thrown out for years," Mr. Rathbone says. "They are still being thrown out." In fact, more now than ever, he suspects.
Programs in some provinces, where consumers pay fees when they buy a new television, are designed to cover recycling costs for old TVs. But there aren't enough facilities; only a few in Canada can do the job to the highest standards without exporting waste or dumping scraps in landfills. British Columbia, for example, must send some TVs to this plant.
THE SHREDDER
Now dismantled, the unwanted TV is ready for the shredder.
Across the warehouse lurks a hulking machine capable of chewing up 4,500 kilograms of electronics an hour. The noise is so overwhelming that Cindy Coutts, who runs the plant, resorts to sign language as we approach. Even with earplugs, it sounds like a jet engine.
She points at one machine, then a second and a third — three shredders. They slice, dice and purée whole TV carcasses into pieces the size of potato chips.
Magnets separate steel, aluminum and copper from plastic. These metals will be sent to a variety of places in Canada and the U.S. for recycling, each destination audited by Sims to ensure the scraps aren't being dumped.
Ridding the world of one TV requires an inordinate amount of effort. It's not uncommon for the parts to travel 2,000 kilometres or more just to be recycled.
RACE AGAINST TIME
There is precious little time to reflect. Mr. Brodie is already tearing apart his next TV. The plant works efficiently — sometimes too efficiently. A new server delivered to the building was once promptly dismantled and shredded by staff who were later horrified to learn their mistake.
Mr. Brodie works quickly. It's the last shift before Christmas — the busiest time of the year for TV sales — which means the next wave of unwanted televisions will soon be upon them. The plant will add dozens of temporary staff just to handle the surge.
But it's not just the castoffs. New TVs returned to stores with suspected glitches come here, too. It is cheaper for electronics makers to shred them than pay technicians to determine what the problem was.
Each TV takes 16 minutes to recycle with shredding. In that time, plants in China will have made 623 new ones.
They are sleek, sexy and far more advanced than the old tubes. And they will sell like hotcakes.
It's a sobering stat: TVs are being made 600 times faster than we can deal with the old ones.
"I don't know if it's something most people think about," Ms. Coutts says.
The roar of the shredders has subsided — for now. More TVs will be arriving soon.
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By the numbers
$1,099 — Average cost to make a 42-inch high-definition television last year
$820 — Average cost to produce that TV now
150 million — Global demand for HD TVs by 2010
