Techno trash piles up
NEW YORK — When Office Depot, Inc. stores ran an electronics recycling drive last summer that accepted everything from cell phones to televisions, some stores were overwhelmed by the amount of e-trash they received.
Contrast that with a mobile phone recycling drive by Westchester County, N.Y., home to more than 900,000 people. It collected just 32 cell phones, which the county sold on eBay Inc. for $82.
No current figures exist for how much e-junk is recycled, but people in the industry believe it’s a sliver of the total. People simply don’t know where to take their e-trash, so much of it sits in drawers. The toxic materials many electronics contain, such as lead and mercury, present more obstacles.
A National Safety Council study done four years ago found that less than 10 percent of techno trash was recycled.
In part because the gadget industry is relatively young, recycling efforts tend to be scattershot: All Staples Inc. stores and some Whole Foods Market Inc. stores will take old cell phones, but few people think to take recyclables to the mall. Many cities will only pick up e-trash on scheduled hazardous waste collection days, which are often months apart.
Meanwhile, outmoded computers clutter closets and busted Game Boys collect dust in basements. About 2 million tons of e-trash was generated in 2001, the last year for which numbers are available, according to estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s 400 million pounds of broken Blackberries, old monitors and burned-out cell phones.
There isn’t much oversight of the recycling that is done. A group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently developed methods for assessing electronics recyclers, using the price recyclers are paid for recovered material as a gauge of quality.
Organizations that monitor technology recyclers say some players in the industry aren’t really recycling. “We estimated that the amount of stuff people think is being recycled, 60 to 80 percent of it is being dumped in containers and sent to China,” said Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
Most cell phone recyclers simply refurbish the phones and sell them in developing markets, such as Latin America.
Smith’s organization has asked recyclers to sign a pledge, promising not to export or burn e-trash, or use prison labor to take it apart or refurbish it (as Dell Inc. did in the past).
The problem, as Smith sees it, is that the costs of recycling have not been included in the purchase of electronic equipment. His group wants to mandate that manufacturers must take back used electronic products when consumers or businesses no longer want them. This will encourage manufacturers to keep toxic materials out of electronics equipment. Recyclers, meanwhile, are working on creative ways to bring in more material. David Beschen, president of GreenDisk in Sammamish, Wash. is working with the U.S. Postal Service on a plan to get used electronics equipment to postal processing centers in trucks that have already dropped off the day’s mail.
Recyclers are seeing their volume increase. Wireless phone recycling and refurbishing company Collective Good says it takes in about eight tons of cell phones a month. Another company, ReCellular, says it processes 10,000 to 15,000 phones a day.
Some recyclers find creative uses for used materials. TechCycle, in Loveland, Colo., recycles everything from scrapped robots once used in manufacturing plants to power lines to the 30,000 pounds of old monitors it processes every day.
The monitors are shipped to China, where an environmentally responsible company turns them into TVs.
Says TechCyle’s Shadrach Rice: “A monitor makes a better TV than a TV does.”