Yeah, thought I had. It's exactly the same machine my old company had. In fact, the video looks identical to the video we made for ours :D Shame they went bust really. Ah bugger it, no it's not, they didn't know what they were doing. Good luck to them, the separate materials are worth something but it's a shame to see otherwise perfectly good laptop casings getting thrown out like that when they're worth more in one piece. Reuse is higher in process than recycling :D

If not politicians, perhaps it could handle bankers? Maybe the bankers would have to be cut in half first, but that should be a fairly simple pre-processing step.

Seriously, we have refining technology to extract metals from mineral ores: would they work with ground up computer hardware? Seems to me a ground up computer could be treated as extremely high grade ore, no? The process need not be called recycling, rather extraction?

I've seen this in action.. they'll show up with a truck. http://www.gigabiter.com/

Blows that sh!t away.

Can it handle larger items, like politicians?

Then again, I doubt there is anything useful to be extracted from them, even when they have been chopped up into iny bits.

The video shows the plant crushing empty computer cases: nothing but plastic and sheet metal. Any metal recycling plant could handle the materials along with the usual dead water heaters and automobiles. There's no story here.

So where does the lead, cadmium, and other nasty stuff go? That's the real concern.