Making the recycling process more efficient and profitable for manufacturers and recyclers is the goal of an ISU research team. The team received a $180,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the project. With numerous computer upgrades and new technological advances, a new category of electronic waste is rapidly being generated, team members said. “One focus of the project is to create an information system that would make recycling easier,” said Sarah Ryan, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering. She said she would like to see a Web site offering instructions to recyclers on the most effective and efficient ways to deal with electronics. Doug Gemmill, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, said he also sees this as a goal of the project. “We need the infrastructure and the information system that would allow the manufacturers to communicate with the recycle centers,” he said. The consumer also needs to know where to take products they no longer use, he said, and recycle centers need to know who would want to buy salvaged materials. Recycling used electronic products is not the only goal of the project, Ryan and Gemmill said. “The other aspect of the project is to work with manufacturers to make products that can be recycled more easily,” Ryan said. Right now, it is not profitable to recycle electronics for several reasons, she said. Recyclers are not receiving sufficient volume to make recycling profitable, the market for recovered materials is not well developed and it is very time consuming and difficult to disassemble electronics. “There’s a huge volume of used computers and televisions that are sitting around and being put in landfills and they contain toxic materials,” she said. This is a problem because chemicals such as mercury, cadmium and lead can contaminate ground water. Ryan said 33 million computers will become obsolete this year and 60 percent of used computers will sit in warehouses because people do not know what to do with them. In other parts of the world, governments are requiring companies to take back used products and packaging, the professors said. Companies in the United States are concerned because this would not be profitable for them at this point. “Recycling is not something people have had to do in the past,” Gemmill said. One challenge of the project will be to make it attractive enough to manufacturers, recyclers and consumers that they will want to use it, he said. He said the project could have a very large scope because this idea eventually could be applied to other products. At this point, the grant is only from August of 2000 to August 2001, but at the end of the year, the team plans to submit another application that could extend it for three more years.