Just out of curiosity, is anyone here recycling old cabling and plant infrastructure for their raw materials, or engaging a recycler to handle those materials? Where I work, there is almost always a renovation project going on. This provides opportunities to rip out Cat3/Cat5/long-abandoned thicknet/thinnet/FDDI-grade fiber/etc, which we normally do. Most of the time that old cabling ends up in the dumpster, but I'm wondering if anyone is recycling it, either by their choice, or as the result of company policy or relevant laws in your area?
Cat3/Cat5 can be broken down to raw materials with some effort, but I haven't seen many recyclers with an economically viable process for doing it. Coax is a bit tougher, but not impossible (same questions about economic viability still apply). Fiber can be tough, expecially if you're dealing with something like 20+ year old gel-buffered cable where the has long-since dried out.
I'd be interested to hear other peoples' experiences along these lines.
jms
Just out of curiosity, is anyone here recycling old cabling and plant
infrastructure for their raw materials, or engaging a recycler to handle
those materials?
There are places that will pay for and recycle old telecom wire. About 11
years ago I did some consulting work for a company that did just that,
usually buying old wire by the railroad car-load and shipping it to a
plant where it was chopped into little bits. The little bits then went
through a vibrating process, where metal went one way, insulation another.
Then the metal bits got sold via comex.
An article I found
<http://www.recyclingtoday.com/Article.aspx?article_id=19750> mentioned
that the front-end process was the toughest for the recyclers. I imagine,
as an operator, the best path would be to call around to various scrap
metal dealers and ask if one of these wire recyclers is in the area.
I have no idea about the feasibility of fiber recycling.
~JasonG
Stripping out wiring and recycling it around here is actually a fairly good business - with buildings and offices changing hands from one major player to another, the new owner usually wants to gut the entire inside of the building and redo it their way. Given that Boise was once a pretty nice place to be for tech companies, and the downturn of the economy, the past two years has seen a spike in the recycling side of things.