2007 Electronics Recycling Supplement - Opportunity Knocks

Rising sales of electronic equipment, which includes everything from personal computers to cell phones to televisions, and pending product obsolescence will lead to new opportunities in electronics recycling for those who provide environmentally sound management.

CONSUMER SALES. Consumer electronics sales in the United States are approaching $160 billion. By the end of 2007, sales are expected to rise about 7 percent to $155 billion, and TV sales are expected to set a record around 26 million units. By 2007, flat panels will increase to 19 million units. Digital TVs are very soon going to overtake analog TVs.

Here is where the big unknown comes in. As analog transmission is phased out in a couple of years, it is really a big, open question as to whether analog televisions will come into the waste stream in huge quantities or whether the converter boxes that are going to be made available at a modest cost are going to cause people to hang on to their analog televisions. As the number of digital TVs go up, there could be an equally large number of analog TVs hitting the waste stream.

Now we’ve reached household penetration for computers at approximately 80 percent. The installed base of PCs was about 280 million in 2006 and is expected to be 404 million in 2010.

DISPOSITION. Let’s talk about what happens to all this stuff. Here we have figures from IDC, which is a major data research company that works for the electronics industry. Nearly 197 million PCs were retired between 2000 and 2005. It is estimated that 237 million PCs will be retired between 2005 and 2010. In 2006, between 30 percent and 35 percent of those PCs were coming from consumers, and between 65 percent and 70 percent were coming from commercial sources.

While most of the electronics that are going into electronics recycling right now are coming from the commercial sector, this may change a bit in the coming years. The commercial sector has been floating the electronics industry all these years. It’s beginning to change a little bit as the states catch on and begin to enact programs that are moving large amounts of residential electronics.

The EPA just completed a detailed disposition study (available at www.epa.gov/ecycling/manage.htm) for electronics, but we simply looked at PCs, TVs, peripherals and cell phones. These are the things that are of major interest to consumers and to states and local governments that are passing laws. We found that between 1980 and 2004, approximately 42 percent of everything that was sold between those years has either been recycled or disposed. Forty-nine percent of these electronics is either in first use or subsequent use, and then we reckon that 9 percent is still in storage, about half of which is TVs and a quarter of which is personal computers.

In 2005, we estimate that somewhere between 15 percent and 20 percent of the products that we studied were recycled and the rest were disposed of, largely to landfills. Additionally, a large number of CRTs were exported. This split between products recycled and those that were disposed of has been constant between 1999 and 2005. That doesn’t mean that the amounts that have been going to recycling haven’t been going up significantly—they have—but we have also been generating more and more of this kind of waste, so the split has remained constant for that reason.

We do not distinguish between commercial and residential sources in our study, but we believe commercial sources dominate.

In 2003, we estimate that from 40.8 million to 47.2 million units, or 290 to 347.8 tons, of electronics were collected for recycling. In 2004, from 48.3 million to 52 million units, or 320 to 359.9 tons, were collected for recycling. In 2005, from 53.9 million to 57 million, or 345 to 379 tons, were collected for recycling.

We estimated the number of units of our in-scope materials (computers, TVs and peripherals) in storage in 2005 at 180 million units, thinking that if anyone wanted to estimate the potential cost of a national system, this might be an interesting number. One has to recall before doing estimates of what it would cost to do national recycling that just because these units are there doesn’t mean that they can be collected or that the consumer is willing to move a piece of equipment from storage to where it is being collected for recycling. Therefore, these numbers don’t translate exactly to definitely recyclable.

ENVIRONMENTALLY SOUND MANAGEMENT.The EPA has Plug-In Guidelines for Environmentally Safe Management (available at www.epa.gov/plugin). For now, these are probably the most widely available, most generally referred to guidelines for what is safe management.

There is also a process underway that EPA is helping to facilitate to develop more detailed best management practices for certification of recyclers. The hope is that we can go from guidelines to a broadly agreed upon certification system for recyclers. This best management practices certification process involves OSHA, the states, manufacturers, recyclers and environmental interest groups. The hope is that there will be a certification system that will address exports, the kinds of activities that guarantee or help to encourage safe recycling of electronics, the types of activities that will encourage protection of workers, materials and what should be done with materials, implementation and cost.

Right now the Federal government operates with a government-wide contract called the READ contract and also does a fair amount of work with Unicor, which is the Federal Prison Industries. Agencies are also free to use other recyclers, but to do that they must do their own due diligence.

Some of the factors the federal government looks for are sound management in awarding the READ and Unicor contracts; follow-up visits are generally done focusing on environmental health and safety; and periodic follow-up assessments of the chosen contractor.

Features appreciated in federal electronics recycling contractors are:

When due diligence is underway, a recycler should have:

Priority materials that recyclers need to be tracking are:

These materials contain potentially hazardous materials, and if they are not handled properly, they will come back to haunt you.

Our appetite for electronics is continuing unabated. The waste quantities are growing at a rapid rate.

States, local governments, retailers and manufacturers are taking significant actions to help increase collection and recycling of electronics. All of the players want safe and environmentally responsible recycling, including the Feds. If you are prepared to provide environmentally safe management of electronics, you are in the right place at the right time.