ABB recycles 13 tonnes of waste drives

The recycling programme, now in its eighth year, takes scrapped drives and recycles them according to the WEEE Directive, even though drives are not covered by the legislation. Once the drive has been removed for recycling, a certificate is issued that can be used for environmental audits by end users complying with ISO 14001. In the UK, ABB has an agreement with the recycling company and approved waste carrier, RID, to transport and recycle the drives. The company collects the old drives from ABB Drives Alliance partners. In the case of large drives or large quantities of smaller drives, RID collects direct from the end user. Jon Clews, ABB's recycling manager, says: "Each of our Alliance partners has a dedicated drives recycling bin and there is also a bin at our drives repair centre in St. Neots. Clews says that one of the major advantages of ABB's swappage scheme – which offers 17.5% off the list price of a new drive – is that the recycling infrastructure is already in place, meaning that customers considering swapping out old drives can be sure they will be recycled according to the regulations. "Combined with our swappage scheme, the recycling programme is a very attractive incentive to companies to replace their old existing drives with the latest advanced models from ABB." ABB claims that its current drives offer over 10% higher efficiency than its most popular drive from the 1980s.