Inbox: Environmental abilities

Auckland’s North Shore-based enterprise for the disabled, Abilities Inc, scored major environmental recycling coup last month.
Environment Minister Nick Smith visited the plant to announce that the Government’s Waste Minimisation Fund would grant the not-for-profit enterprise $110,000 to help it buy technology to safely recycle old and lead-riddled cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and other components from old television sets.
Abilities was established in 1959 to provide employment for people with disabilities. It employs about 140 people of whom 120 have disabilities. The company now earns more than 50 percent of its income from recycling-related activities. It will help dispose of around two million old televisions and computers with its new technology.
“Abilities is the kind of forward-thinking and innovative enterprise New Zealand needs to show,” said Smith. “It makes change for me not to deliver cost-cutting announcement, but instead help an enterprising organisation that has come up with way to provide more work for disabled people and simultaneously solve major environmental problem for New Zealand.”
The Swedish made Hot Band Technology is the only plant of its kind to be installed in New Zealand. It will be operational early next year, according to Abilities managing director Peter Fraher. The timing is ideal, he said, as around 500,000 televisions will become obsolete with the change from analogue to digital broadcast in 2013.
The Abilities programme will divert 750 tonnes of TV glass from local landfill, recycle 70 percent of it locally and safely process lead from the CRTs to send to special processing plant in Europe. M