The incident occurred in a factory where components were being
salvaged from various used instruments, such as
photocopiers or personal computers. These machines were
crushed and valuable materials were taken. The crush
process was two steps – first to destroy the instruments to
plate state, and then to crush them to small materials. This
work was conducted in a closed space for safety reasons.
Prior to the incident this second part of the crushing process
had been in two steps – removal of toner cartridge and then
crushing. Just before the incident, the facilities were modified
so that they could do both processes at the same time. This
combined the process of removing the toner cartridge from
the copy machine and crushing the toner cartridge.