Electronics

North Carolina considers repealing landfill ban on electronics

Some legislators in North Carolina have expressed their opposition to a 2010 law that bars electronics, such as computers, printers and TVs, from landfills in the state, saying the law should be repealed, according to an article in the Citizen-Times, Asheville, North Carolina.

The article reports that a 2010 law barring electronics from landfills also created the recycling program, paid for by annual fees charged to electronics manufacturers, which accept the used products or have recycling outlets doing so on their behalf.

Several lawmakers say the landfill ban for electronics should be repealed “because there aren’t enough recyclers accepting those electronics and there’s a broader market downturn for such goods,” according to the Citizen-Times.

According to the article, Sen. Trudy Wade says the state does not have enough recyclers to collect old TVs and computers, leading some people to throw them into the woods or ditches. A downturn in the recycled electronics market also is discouraging industry growth, she says.

“If recycling ever comes back and there’s a profit to be made, we can always change the law and go back to recycling,” Wade told the Citizen-Times. “But right now, we have a bigger problem with them being abandoned and the possibility of having some kind of contamination because we don’t have anywhere to put them.”

A number of media outlets have reported that environmental groups are criticizing the proposed program repeal, according to the article.

“Allowing computers and televisions to be thrown into landfills undermines an important industry as well as our environment,” Dustin Chicurel-Bayard, a state Sierra Club spokesman, says.

Rep. Pricey Harrison, a legislator on environmental issues, says politics also was to blame for the repeal effort. She says the program has taken years to develop “but really hasn’t had much of a chance to prove its merits yet,” the Citizen-Times reports.

NCER releases ‘The Electronics Recycling Landscape Report’

According to the National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER), Vienna, West Virginia, U.S. consumers are estimated to have purchased more than 1 billion devices in 2015, and more than 3.8 billion devices are thought to be in use or stored in homes.

Reuse, refurbishment and recycling activities can capture the value of these devices and their components, protect human health and the environment through responsible used device management and conserve the resources embedded in the devices, NCER says.

The Sustainability Consortium, Tempe, Arizona, and the NCER, commissioned by the Closed Loop Foundation, which is affiliated with the Closed Loop Fund, have released a report on the current used electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) management landscape within the U.S.

This report, which is based on a combination of research and stakeholder surveys, explores:

• the types and quantities of materials that are moving and will be moving from the consumer market into the waste stream;
• programs in place to deal with e-scrap and their effectiveness; and
• key drivers and innovations that will affect effectiveness of electronics recycling moving forward.

The report states that the challenges the existing electronics management systems face “originate with the nature of the devices themselves—assemblies of a large number of mixed materials connected for functionality and configured to optimize manufacturing, assembly and distribution. This situation will become worse over the next five years due to electronics industry trends that are creating smaller, lighter and far more interconnected and complex devices. Further challenges for effective reuse and recovery are evolving as any given device contains less of any given material and as these smaller devices are being distributed more extensively through society as electronics are integrated into our cities, homes and even automobiles.”

The full report is available online at http://bit.ly/1S3WWtX.

BAN finds trouble in its own backyard

Basel Action Network (BAN), the Seattle-based group that manages the e-Stewards electronics recycling certification program, has revoked that certification for Total Reclaim, saying the Seattle firm “was identified by BAN’s e-Trash Transparency Project (an electronic tracking program) to have exported mercury-containing LCD (liquid crystal display) monitors to Hong Kong.”

BAN has posted several documents about the Total Reclaim situation to its website, including an “evidentiary report” and a statement from Total Reclaim’s Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle apologizing for the lapses in certification protocol.

“We are very sorry that we have let down our industry, our customers, our employees and all those who have believed in us,” write the duo. Lorch and Zirkle also write, “Economic challenges never excuse wrong behavior. The reality, though, is that squeezed by plummeting commodity prices; increasing labor costs; long-term, fixed-price contracts; and, especially, a dramatically increasing volume of flat-screen devices, we made a short-term business decision to export materials to undocumented processing facilities in Hong Kong.”

As part of its e-Trash Transparency Project, BAN says it “placed 200 small GPS-based tracking devices into old printers and monitors and delivered them to Goodwill and to various recyclers around the country.”

Two tracked devices went from Total Reclaim’s possession to the New Territories of Hong Kong, where units are disassembled in non-e-Stewards-certified facilities.

A BAN news release on the e-Trash Transparency Project also scrutinizes the recycling partnership between computer maker Dell Inc. and Goodwill Industries. BAN says 46 of the 200 tracker-planted devices were delivered to Goodwill stores in the U.S. and that “seven of these later reported their whereabouts in the Asian countries of Thailand, Taiwan and China.”