CalRecycle busts e-scrap handler for recycling fraud

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), Sacramento, California, has reported that an Orange County, California-based electronic scrap handler owes up to $154,836 in restitution to CalRecycle following a multiyear recycling fraud investigation. 

In 2014, CalRecycle’s E-Waste Recycling Program staff learned that Recycle Your City, a now defunct company based in Costa Mesa, California, had discrepancies in collection logs, including inflated counts of materials and falsified names and addresses of individuals who supposedly discarded the electronic waste, as well as a lack of source information, CalRecycle reports in a news release on the fraud case. As a result, the department disallowed the recycler’s e-waste recycling payment claims for material from Recycle Your City, and the E-Waste Recycling Program staff alerted the California Department of Justice, which launched an investigation and prosecuted the case. 

Oct. 27, 2017, Glen Davis, owner of Recycle Your City, pled guilty of attempt to file false or forged instrument and grand theft. Jan. 29, Davis was sentenced to probation community service and restitution, and May 14, Orange County Probation Department approved a maximum restitution amount of $154,836.

"The E-Waste Recycling Program is meant to ensure that hazardous material is handled properly and does not harm our environment,” CalRecycle Director Scott Smithline says. “Companies who try to take advantage of the program will find out that there are real consequences for their actions.”

CalRecycle’s E-Waste Recycling Program is intended to provide all Californians convenient ways to recycle certain electronic waste to keep hazardous materials from ending up in landfills. That particular program has managed more than 2.3 billion pounds of e-scrap since 2005, CalRecycle reports.

CalRecycle reports that Davis was a handler, someone who collects and transfers electronic scrap to a collector approved by the E-Waste Recycling Program. The approved collectors must provide compliant collection logs to CalRecycle for materials to be eligible for payment.