Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:55:09 -0500, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

The EPA ground the glass to a very fine dust, then dumped it into
acid, rather than do an honest test.

Yep. However, even that's not good enough for the EPA. The new
solution involves grinding it down to a fine powder, and encapsulating
the mess in high tech concrete:
http://ewasteguide.info/biblio/encapsulation
I don't suppose any of the researchers considered that once the CRT is
ground down to a fine powder, just heating the stuff will separate out
the lead and glass, thus offering recycling opportunities.

On top of that, they claimed to
only recover a small percentage of the lead. "The claim of 27 pounds of
lead in every TV" made by a local TV station was funny. I emailed them
and asked where it was, since most of my TVs weighed less than 20
pounds. Of course they didn't reply because they were caught in a lie.

I've seen one claim of 50 lbs of lead per TV. The real numbers for
TV's is somewhere between 1.5 lbs for 14" screens, to 12 lbs for 50"
screens. These numbers are from a 1999 study, so I expect current
numbers to be considerably lower.

Note that one can purchase lead free CRT monitors:
http://www.philipschannel.com/monitors/pdf/107B60.pdf
but one still has to pay the deposit in Calif. These use barium
instead of lead, which is currently deemed safe.

By the EPA figures, CRTs were about 50% lead.

Chuckle... For just the CRT tube, it's actually about 8% of the weight
of the tube. The EPA used the same 1999 study that I've been using,
so the numbers are a bit dated. See:
http://www.epa.gov/dfe/pubs/comp-dic/lca-sum/ques8.pdf
Lead is a significant material in current CRTs, accounting
for up to eight percent of the overall composition of the
CRT by weight.
That's down from the 20% or so from the 1999 study. Current figures
are even lower than the 8%.


The 50% came from the screwy numbers reported by that TV station.


I just noticed this interesting quote from the EPA FAQ:
Lead is not as prevalent in LCDs, being found only
on printed wiring boards.
So, why are we paying deposits on LCD's that contain no more lead than
the average Hi-Fi or computah? Is it the mercury in the backlighting
tubes? Maybe, but I suspect it's just to help pay for the CRT
disposal.


That's why the phone company had a surtax to pay for the 1898
Spanish-American war that lasted over 100 years. It's a way to hide the
government's greed.

--
The movie 'Deliverance' isn't a documentary!