Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Reexamination Certificate
1998-06-10
2001-05-01
Cosimano, Edward R. (Department: 2761)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
C707S793000, C705S002000, C705S002000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06226617
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a discarded article treatment system for carrying out treatments or disposal of waste manufactured articles.
BACKGROUND ART
Heretofore, discarded articles such as discarded electric appliances for home use are collected and treated by dealers entrusted by a local government and junk dealers engaged in garbage or waste disposal or treatment business. In such discarded articles, some parts of metals such as iron, aluminum and the like are segregated and sorted to be recycled as restored materials/substances. However, in the present state of situation, most of the discarded articles are disposed of for the reclamation or landfill after fragmentation or cremation without undergoing any treatment or processing. As a consequence, there have been arisen serious environmental problems. By way of example, in conjunction with the landfill, there may be mentioned a problem of shortage of land or lot required therefor and problems of soil contamination and water pollution. Similarly, cremation of the discarded or waste articles encounters serious problems such as air pollution, global warming due to generation of CO
2
and the like. Such being the circumstances, there exists a great social demand for the efforts for promoting the recycling of the discarded manufactured articles (reuse of the discarded articles as resources) in order to reduce the amount of wastes or make the most of the fossil fuel which is naturally limited while preventing contamination due to discard of harmful wastage.
In the waste disposal facilities, more particularly in the factories for disassembling and segregating the discarded articles, it is required to carry out proper treatments, i.e., detachment or segregation of all the harmful and hazardous materials/substances and parts from the collected discarded articles as well as sorting thereof and transfer the resultants to proper treatment processes or to junk dealers as well as segregation/sorting of materials and parts incapable of treatments with the treating equipment or facilities installed in the relevant treatment-entrusted factory which is in charge or capable of treatment of discarded articles, valuable things to be segregated before shredding and the others (e.g. those destined for shredding treatment by shredders, those susceptible to sorting and recovery of materials resulting from the separation or segregation) and then transport the resultants to the proper treatment processes and the junk dealers correspondingly.
In practice, however, because of less availability of the information required for segregation/sorting, attempts for proper and appropriate treatments of the discarded articles actually encounter difficulty in determining what kinds of component parts and/or materials or substances the discarded articles are composed or made of, locating harmful parts and valuable things and other, as a result of which there are ultimately incurred frequently improper treatments of the discarded articles.
In the present states of the art, the information concerning the methods for carrying out the proper and appropriate treatments of the discarded articles is essentially difficult to acquire. By way of example, almost all of the manufactured articles contain little indication or information concerning the disassembling method, materials or substances of the component parts or the like. On the other hand, the manufacturers are not in the position to afford such information. Further, acquisition of such information takes an awful lot of time.
For the reasons mentioned above, many or most of the discarded articles are disposed of as wastage without undergoing any proper and appropriate treatments.
With the present invention, it is contemplated as an object thereof to reduce the amount of wastage to thereby prevent contamination due to harmful wastes and make the most of the fossil fuel which is naturally limited.
Another object of the present invention is to protect contamination due to harmful wastes by treating or disposing of discarded articles or things properly and appropriately.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
For achieving the above-mentioned objects, the present invention proposes that information required for treatment such as separating procedure of a manufactured article or the like is affixed to the article so that proper and appropriate treatment can be executed on the basis of the information affixed to the manufactured article in a treatment-entrusted factory.
In concrete, there are provided:
a means for reading out from a manufactured article being subjected to treatment a plurality of treatment procedures and information concerning facilities required for executing the above-mentioned treatment procedures,
a storage means for storing the information concerning facilities which a treatment-entrusted factory in charge of treatment of the above-mentioned manufactured article is equipped with, and
an executing means for extracting the stored information of the facilities which the treatment-entrusted factory is equipped with and facilities information required for executing the treatment procedure to thereby select a treatment procedure capable of being carried out by the facilities which the treatment-entrusted factory is equipped with,
wherein the manufactured article is treated in accordance with the selected treatment procedure mentioned above.
Further, there are provided:
a step of reading out from a manufactured article being subjected to treatment a plurality of treatment procedures and information concerning facilities required for executing the above-mentioned treatment procedures,
a step of selecting a treatment procedure capable of being carried out by facilities installed in a treatment-entrusted factory from the information concerning the facilities of the treatment-entrusted factory which is in charge of treatment of the manufactured article and the information concerning the facilities required for executing the above-mentioned treatment procedure, and
a step of treating the manufactured article in accordance with the selected treatment procedure mentioned above.
In this manner, not only the treatment procedures suited for the facilities of the individual factories can be carried out but also the proper and appropriate treatment of the discarded articles can be realized, whereby the environment pollution due to the disposal of the harmful waste can be prevented.
Further, the above-mentioned storage means stores additionally operating costs of the above-mentioned facilities, respectively, while the above-mentioned executing means arithmetically determines overall operating costs involved in carrying out the above-mentioned selected treatment procedures, respectively, to thereby select a treatment procedure which is lowest with regards to the calculated overall operating cost determined arithmetically, whereby the treatment of the discarded article can be realized with low cost and high efficiency.
By way of example, the above-mentioned operating cost is stored as operating cost per unit time,
wherein for calculation of the above-mentioned overall operating cost, the executing means estimates a time taken for treatment of the article being subjected to the treatment on the basis of dimension or alternatively weight of the article to be treated by the above-mentioned facility and multiplies the estimated time by the operating cost per unit time, whereby the overall operating cost can be calculated.
Furthermore, according to another mode for carrying out the present invention, there are provided:
a means for reading out from a manufactured article being subjected to treatment component parts of the article and specific properties of the above-mentioned component parts,
a means for storing predetermined specific properties serving as information for detachment,
an executing means for extracting the component parts to be separated on the basis of the predetermined specific properties as stored and specific properties of the component parts of concern, to thereby determine different treatment
Hayashi Masakatsu
Hiroshige Yuzo
Kitamura Takashi
Ochiai Yuji
Ohashi Toshijiro
Antonelli Terry Stout & Kraus LLP
Cosimano Edward R.
Hitachi , Ltd.
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