lcd monitors cost money to recycle made in china

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Americans are spending more money than ever on electronics, and businesses and organizations are no exception. In fact, on average, businesses can spend upwards of 7 percent of their budgets on electronics.

Until recently, electronics recyclers could export plastic scrap to China and other countries to be recycled and made into other products. However, China—and shortly following, Thailand and Vietnam—have banned imports of plastic scrap over the past few years. That means recyclers don’t have an outlet for semi-processed plastics and now run into charges themselves down the recycling pipeline. To keep the service up and running, recyclers can no longer accept electronics for free.

Some plastics used to be valuable, simple to separate, and easy to sell for recyclers. But, that value is now dropping—plastics used in consumer electronics often have chemicals such as fire retardants that make them difficult or even impossible to reuse and recycle. Electronics are also composed of several types of plastics, making them difficult to separate. These plastics are also some of the least valuable materials in the items.

Printers, for example, can have upwards of four different plastics, which makes it difficult for recyclers to separate them. Black plastics—one of the most commonly used plastics in electronics—can be particularly hard to recycle, as the color can prevent detection of the various types of plastics in the object.

In response to changes in plastics and their value, some recyclers have moved to incinerating, illegally exporting, or landfilling these items, which has a negative impact on the environment. Responsible recyclers will spend extra time and resources to ensure toxic chemicals don’t make it into the environment and that plastics don’t end up in a landfill during the recycling process. Since there’s little or no value recyclers can get from these items, recyclers are limited to charging fees to offset the cost of the process.

Additionally, the value of plastic and other materials, such as lithium-ion (found in batteries), plastic fans, and CD Roms, is continuously in flux. While the value of some materials remains relatively stable, the unpredictability of the metals market also affects charges to e-recycling customers.

In addition to fire retardants and other toxic chemicals added to today’s electronics, our electronics are also becoming smaller and include fewer precious metals than technology produced in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Earlier computers, for example, were bulkier and had larger boards inside of them containing higher amounts of precious metals than today’s computers. Recyclers were thus able to pay for these computers and found most of their margin by dismantling them and processing the precious metals. Now, though, our technology is getting smaller and more efficient, with fewer materials used. Computers don’t need as many precious metals to conduct electricity or function efficiently, which means there’s less margin for the retailer to make.

Today’s electronics also contain more sheet metal than ever before—by weight, 60-70 percent of computers, for example, is sheet metal, which many recyclers must treat as waste. Unless the recycler is part of a larger company with a metal scrap division, they may have to charge more to offset their margin.

Recycling is a well-established industry, with many recyclers having been in business for multiple decades. With advances in the composition of today’s electronics, e-recycling requires new equipment, and that equipment can get expensive. Electronics recyclers have no way to add or replace equipment without charging fees for recycling materials, and without proper equipment, they can’t recycle electronics responsibly.

The highest cost of recycling, however, is the labor—while some e-recycling can be mechanized, workers are still required to run the machines, remove items from the machines, inventory materials and document the process, and otherwise run the show. There’s also the health and safety of employees to consider, which means protecting them from exposure to toxic chemicals and other potential hazards. All of these factors contribute to the expenses facing today’s electronics recyclers.

Responsible electronics recyclers have proven processes for secure data destruction and follow EPA, R2, NAID, and NIST standards for disposing of electronics. But, obtaining and maintaining these certifications isn’t free for e-recyclers—they have to pay to become certified initially, and are also required to run monthly audits. They need staff such as environmental and quality departments to ensure all standards are met for continued certification.

The cost of data destruction is also steep for electronics recyclers. Some companies, such as Sadoff E-Recycling & Data Destruction, assume liability for your data. Once you turn it over to us, we are completely liable for your data, and we need insurance to take on liability. Since we understand the risks associated with handing over your electronics, we provide certificates of destruction. Put simply, it costs to recycle electronics the right way.

While we may think e-recycling should be free due to sustainability benefits and environmental stewardship, e-recycling is still a business. Much like trash removal, e-recycling is a service that requires fees for disposing of items.

There are some fixed costs that e-recyclers cannot control, such as freight and cost of transport. But, the right e-recycling partner can provide consultation on how to mitigate other costs, and they can provide other value, such as secure data destruction.

Sadoff E-Recycling & Data Destruction helps businesses identify items of value and can recycle scrap metal, as well. One partner who consulted with Sadoff E-Recycling & Data Destruction ended up reducing their $100,000 yearly recycling costs by at least 50 percent and expects additional savings in the coming years. We also provide IT Asset Remarketing or IT Asset Disposition, a service that refurbishes and sells your electronics, passing additional profit back to you or your business.

Want more information on how you can save on electronics recycling costs? Contact Sadoff E-Recycling & Data Destruction to learn more about our processes and how you can benefit from making us your trusted e-recycling partner.

E-waste, or electronic waste, consists of everything from scrapped TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners to that old desktop computer that may be collecting dust in your closet.

Many of these gadgets were initially manufactured in China. Through a strange twist of global economics, much of this electronic junk returns to China to die.

“According to United Nations data, about 70% of electronic waste globally generated ended up in China,” said Ma Tianjie, a spokesman for the Beijing office of Greenpeace.

“Much of [the e-waste] comes through illegal channels because under United Nations conventions, there is a specific ban on electronic waste being transferred from developed countries like the United States to countries like China and Vietnam.”

For the past decade, the southeastern town of Guiyu, nestled in China’s main manufacturing zone, has been a major hub for the disposal of e-waste. Hundreds of thousands of people here have become experts at dismantling the world’s electronic junk.

On seemingly every street, laborers sit on the pavement outside workshops ripping out the guts of household appliances with hammers and drills. The roads in Guiyu are lined with bundles of plastic, wires, cables and other garbage. Different components are separated based on their value and potential for re-sale. On one street sits a pile of green and gold circuit boards. On another, the metal cases of desktop computers.

In one workshop, men sliced open sacks of these plastic chips, which they then poured into large vats of fluid. They then used shovels and their bare hands to stir this synthetic stew.

“We sell this plastic to Foxconn,” one of the workers said, referring to a Taiwanese company that manufactures products for many global electronics companies, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

This may be one of the world’s largest informal recycling operations for electronic waste. In one family-run garage, workers seemed to specialize in sorting plastic from old televisions and cars into different baskets. “If this plastic cup has a hole in it, you throw it away,” said a man who ran the operation, pointing to a pink plastic mug. “We take it and re-sell it.”

According to the April 2013 U.N. report “E-Waste in China,” Guiyu suffered an “environmental calamity” as a result of the wide-scale e-waste disposal industry in the area.

Much of the toxic pollution comes from burning circuit boards, plastic and copper wires, or washing them with hydrochloric acid to recover valuable metals like copper and steel. In doing so, workshops contaminate workers and the environment with toxic heavy metals like lead, beryllium and cadmium, while also releasing hydrocarbon ashes into the air, water and soil, the report said.

Studies by the Shantou University Medical College revealed that many children tested in Guiyu had higher than average levels of lead in their blood, which can stunt the development of the brain and central nervous system.

Piles of technological scrap had been dumped in a muddy field just outside of town. There, water buffalo grazed and soaked themselves in ponds surrounded by piles of electronic components with labels like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Epson and Dell.

“Releases of mercury can occur during the dismantling of equipment such as flat screen displays,” wrote Greenpeace, in a report titled “Toxic Tech.” “Incineration or landfilling can also result in releases of mercury to the environment…that can bioaccumulate and biomagnify to high levels in food chains, particularly in fish.”

Most of the workers in Guiyu involved in the e-waste business are migrants from destitute regions of China and poorly educated. Many of them downplayed the potential damage the industry could cause to their health.

“Of course it isn’t healthy,” said Lu, a woman who was rapidly sorting plastic shards from devices like computer keyboards, remote controls and even computer mice. She and her colleagues burned plastic using lighters and blow-torches to identify different kinds of material.

Several migrants said that while the work is tough, it allows them more freedom than working on factory lines where young children are not permitted to enter the premises and working hours are stringent.

Despite the environmental degradation and toxic fumes permeating the air, many in Guiyu said that conditions have improved dramatically over the years.

“I remember in 2007, when I first came here, there was a flood of trash,” said Wong, a 20-year-old man who ferried bundles of electronic waste around on a motorcycle with a trailer attached to it.

“Before people were washing metals, burning things and it severely damaged people’s lungs,” Wong added. “But now, compared to before, the [authorities] have cracked down pretty hard.”

A group of farmers who had migrated from neighboring Guangxi province to cultivate rice in Guiyu told CNN they did not dare drink the local well water.

“It may not sound nice, but we don’t dare eat the rice that we farm because it’s planted here with all the pollution,” Zhou said, pointing at water-logged rice paddy next to him.

Not that surprising considering that the latest food scandal to hit the country earlier this month is cadmium-laced rice. Officials in Guangzhou city, roughly 400 kilometers away from Guiyu, found high rates of cadmium in rice and rice products. According to the city’s Food and Drug Administration samples pulled from a local restaurant, food seller and two university canteens showed high levels of cadmium in rice and rice noodles. Officials did not specify how the contaminated rice entered the city’s food supply.

CNN made several attempts to contact the Guiyu town government. Government officials refused to comment on the electronic waste issue and hung up the phone.

“Why are they stopping the garbage from reaching us?” asked one man who ran a plastic sorting workshop. “Of course it’s hurting our business,” he added.

The Chinese government had some success regulating e-waste disposal with a “Home Appliance Old for New Rebate Program,” which was tested from 2009 to 2011.

“Domestic generation of e-waste has risen rapidly as a result of technological and economic development,” the U.N. reported. It cited statistics showing an exponential surge in sales of TV’s, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and computers in China over a 16-year period.

To avoid a vicious cycle of pollution, resulting from both the manufacture and disposal of appliances, Greenpeace has lobbied for manufacturers to use fewer toxic chemicals in their products.

Guiyu, China, is the last stop for tens of millions of tons of discarded TVs, cell phones, batteries, computer monitors, and other types of electronic waste each year. In this area of Guangdong province in southeast China, the industry is characterized by thousands of small, family-run workshops interspersed with residences, schools, and stores. The workshops employ hundreds of thousands of local and migrant workers to extract copper, silver, gold, platinum, and other materials for resale, often burning or using acid baths to separate out the elements of interest. NIEHS-supported researcher Aimin Chen, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, is studying the impacts of e-waste recycling on pregnant women and their children in Guiyu.

With an estimated 20–50 million tons of e-waste produced annually worldwide, it is the fastest-growing stream of municipal solid waste. Management of e-waste is a significant environmental health concern. In developing countries, where most informal and primitive e-waste recycling occurs, workers and others who live near these recycling facilities are exposed to dangerous chemicals with potentially long-term adverse health effects. Other locations where such recycling is prevalent include India and Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria in Africa.

As they process e-waste, workers—who are often children—are directly exposed to lead, cadmium, brominated flame retardants, and other toxic chemicals, many that present development risks. Chen noted that workshops are rarely well-ventilated and workers wear little, if any, personal protective equipment. Individually, these chemicals carry health risks; mixtures of them are potentially further cause for concern. The e-waste that is not commercially viable is dumped or burned. Thus, workers and others in the community, including children, are exposed through inhalation of fumes, ingestion of dust, contact with water and soil, and other pathways.

Chen is working in Guiyu with Xia Huo, M.D., Ph.D., a professor and Director of the Analytical Cytology Lab at nearby Shantou University Medical College. The joint study enrolled 600 pregnant women from Guiyu and from a control site. The researchers measured metal exposures in the women, and are looking at birth outcomes and, ultimately, long-term outcomes on the infants’ neurobehavioral development. Chen said they hope to publish the first of their results in the next few months. “We want to analyze exposure levels, and also provide some recommendations about how to advise the community about the risks,” he said.

Huo has conducted her own research on children in Guiyu since 2004. She said she became aware of the potential problems associated with e-waste recycling after joining the faculty at Shantou, about 40 kilometers away from Guiyu, in 1998. A memory of two small children swimming in a highly polluted stream in Guiyu stays with her more than a decade later. In addition to focusing on children because of their developmental issues, studying the workers is also difficult, she said, because they move frequently from workshop to workshop, and even between Guiyu and their homes elsewhere in China. Also, employers are often reluctant to allow researchers to enter their facilities and slow down the work, she said.

Chen’s and Huo’s studies are part of a growing, but still small, body of research on the impacts of e-waste on children. The observed health issues, including respiratory irritation and skin burning, in addition to the effects mentioned above, led the World Health Organization recently to develop an initiative on e-waste and children’s health. In June, with support from NIEHS and others, WHO convened a Work Group on E-Waste and Children to bring together experts and other stakeholders (see Box). An informal survey conducted in preparation for the meeting indicated only a handful of studies exist that look into health impacts of e-waste. One of the objectives of the meeting was to call more attention to the issue among the global scientific and medical communities.

There are some small signs that improved awareness and knowledge of the hazards can lead to improvement. For example, Huo said Guiyu local authorities published a decree in 2012 to ban burning e-waste and soaking it in sulfuric acids, and have promised greater supervision and fines for offenses. She also said that 2012 was the second year since 2004 that concentrations of metal, especially lead, decreased in the children studied. (They attribute the other year of decline—2009—to the global financial crisis that resulted in smaller volume of materials recycled.) Still, much remains to be done in Guiyu and worldwide. Increased awareness of this issue among global consumers, evidence-based interventions, and policy changes will be important to reduce the burden of disease among children and adults working in the e-waste recycling trade.

At the Working Group on E-Waste and Children’s Health meeting convened by WHO in June and co-sponsored by NIEHS and Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, NIEHS Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., stressed the importance of understanding and mitigating against the effects of e-waste recycling.

“Having this group review the current situation of e-waste exposure in children, identify research gaps, and highlight successful interventions and strategies will help us determine our next steps,” she said in opening remarks to the participants via a prerecorded video. “E-waste and the impact that it can have on health is a major topic of concern for all of you and for us at NIEHS, especially the impact it has on pregnant women and young children living so close to e-waste recycling sites.”

Chen and Huo were among the approximately 60 experts and other key stakeholders from WHO, other UN agencies, and research institutions. Next steps include creation of a network of researchers willing to share data and disseminate findings, dedicated sessions on e-waste at the Pacific Basin Consortium Meeting and the Fourth WHO International Conference on Children’s Environmental Health, and several publications. In addition, NIEHS will develop a white paper that connects the discussions and recommendations of the meeting as they relate to the mission of the Institute.

Jim Puckett got the messages from his “little lie detectors.” They were small devices, not much bigger than a deck of cards. Being GPS trackers, they also didn’t look much like actual lie detectors. For years, as the head of the Basel Action Network, Puckett and his team have been throwing them in the trash.

Electronics can be hazardous when disposed of improperly, and the Basel Action Network, or BAN, investigates the underground world of the e-waste trade. The nonprofit group secretly embeds trackers in discarded devices, then hands them to recyclers to see where they end up, exposing bad practices in the process. After dropping bugged LCD monitors in Oregon, they followed along as the trackers traced a circuitous route through the summer of 2015 and into the fall.

Puckett knew that Hong Kong was a destination for e-waste shipments — a place where workers might toil in makeshift reclamation yards, breaking apart electronics without regard for the severe health consequences. Ideally, electronics are broken down professionally, carefully discarded with safety in mind. Instead, unqualified laborers can poison their towns, develop cancer, and damage their nervous systems. Globally, the human and environmental toll of the work is impossible to calculate.

The travel overseas wasn’t the only thing the trackers uncovered. The team at BAN was also shocked by where the monitors traveled inside the United States. They seemed to pass through property owned by a Seattle recycler Puckett knew. Strangely, they’d also made their way to Seattle’s Harbor Island, a 420-acre artificial island in the mouth of the city’s Duwamish River.

The team at BAN zoomed in on where the trackers had stopped on the island. On Google Street View, if you checked in just the right place, you could make out the words on trucks sitting on the island: Total Reclaim.Puckett knew the company well.

“It was very disappointing,” he tells me. Total Reclaim wasn’t just an example of a company seemingly doing everything right. It was run by friends. “Probably one of the most troubling things I’ve experienced in this business of being an advocate was getting a real ally,” he says, “and to find out that you were betrayed.”

Lorch was an active part of the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, where he lived, participating in the local community council and tutoring grade school students in the area. A fellow co-chair said years later he was “a pillar of our community.” He co-founded a nonprofit in the area dedicated to giving bicycles to young people who couldn’t afford them.

Zirkle, who had a taste for working with numbers, found work recycling refrigerators, and after meeting Lorch, the two launched a recycling business called Total Reclaim in 1991. At first, Total Reclaim handled refrigerators and other appliances, but over time, found that they’d established a niche, helping governments and businesses take care of e-waste that was difficult to dispose of responsibly.

“I knew one of them fairly well. It was Craig Lorch,” says Jason Linnell, executive director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling. “He was active in a lot of state discussions in Oregon and Washington and nationally.”

Total Reclaim’s business boomed. By 2000, the company had expanded into electronics more broadly, and eventually became the largest electronics recycler in the northwest United States. Between 2010 and 2015, according to the company, 170 employees recycled an average of 40 million pounds of electronics and lights a year. Lorch and Zirkle made millions of dollars as the company expanded over the years.

The recycling process was complex. Customers dropped off hauls of electronics — keyboards, mice, laptops, copy machines, whatever they had with a cord — and Total Reclaim workers screened them for reuse, wiping hard drives and moving the products along to new buyers.

For other products, it was the end of the road. Total Reclaim employees hand-dismantled those items. If they were dealing with a computer, workers would tear out the components, shred the hard drive, take out lithium-ion batteries, and separate the rest of the materials for buyers. Steel, aluminum, and precious metals could go to metal refiners. Assembly line workers picked through the larger pieces, sorting the plastics and whatever else ended up on the line.

Puckett remembers getting involved with Total Reclaim in the 2000s, as BAN investigated e-waste exports and interviewed recyclers on their practices. “A lot of doors got slammed in our researcher’s face and the only one that would talk to us was Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim,” he says. As BAN kept working on e-waste issues, Total Reclaim became the nonprofit’s shining example. The company signed on to a responsible e-waste recycling pledge developed by BAN, and later signed on to a certification program, called e-Stewards, that included regular audits, saying they would always recycle responsibly.

In exchange, Puckett says, BAN drove customers toward Lorch and the company. “We made him richer by far by sending a lot of business to him,” Puckett says. “He was able to expand in Oregon and Alaska and really create a Northwest empire of the leading recycler. And he advertised that he would never export — always do the right thing.”

Total Reclaim grew into a fixture in the community, and in the process, Puckett and Lorch grew close. Puckett says he took Lorch’s advice on issues, brought Total Reclaim into internal meetings, and if a reporter interested in e-waste dropped in, he’d offer them Total Reclaim as an example of how to do e-waste recycling the right way.

At one point, Lorch appeared in a BAN-produced documentary, explaining the dangerous economics of the export business. “It’s all about the money,” he says in the documentary. “You’re charging on the front side, you’re selling the material on the backside offshore. You don’t do any work in between, you just arrange to have the material loaded into a shipping container and shipped.”

BAN, meanwhile, took up the tracker program, scoring some major successes in the process, and in 2015, they started work on another report, this time handing over LCD monitors in Oregon. BAN would offer small companies the monitors for recycling, with plans to see where they ultimately traveled. It didn’t take long to see waste moving from those recyclers to Total Reclaim, which worked with the smaller businesses. But instead of being recycled domestically, the trackers showed the waste flowing to Hong Kong.

“We were shocked,” Puckett says. “We were just like, ‘Whoa. These things do not lie. What’s going on with Total Reclaim, our poster child of the good guys?’”

“Amazingly, we didn’t leave a tracker at your site,” Puckett says he told Lorch, “but the data shows that people that were using you as a downstream, their trackers went off shortly after they came to you.”

As Puckett tells it, Lorch “feigned outrage.” He and Zirkle said at a later meeting that there must have been a mistake. Total Reclaim didn’t send e-waste to Hong Kong. According to Puckett, the two suggested the tracker had found its way into something else — it could have been dislodged and fallen into some plastic on its way overseas. Puckett says he asked for a way to back up the claim, and received some shipping paperwork. What he didn’t tell Lorch was that he had already planned a trip to Hong Kong to uncover evidence for himself.

The United States is taking in — and throwing out — an astonishing number of devices every year: millions of tons of televisions, phones, computers, appliances. Americans rarely see the aftermath.

Electronics have a host of toxic materials inside of them, and researchers have carefully cataloged the damage they can cause when disassembled. Consider LCD monitors with mercury that, when smashed, can form a toxin that can damage a person’s organs and nervous system. Cathode-ray tubes contain lead, which can poison an ecosystem’s microorganisms. Cadmium, which is used in computer batteries and circuit boards, has been linked to skeletal deformities in animals.

To handle its waste, the US has turned to other nations, funneling discarded electronics to South Asia and Africa, where laborers scrap products for salvageable metals. The workers might burn the material in the open air, or treat it in an acid bath, sifting through the remains for small amounts of potentially valuable metals, like gold.

The results can be devastating. A 2007 study found that children in Guiyu, China, a hotspot for e-waste dumping at the time, had radically elevated levels of lead in their blood. In the same village, according to a 2008 study, dust contained heavy metals at a rate hundreds of times higher than nearby sites without e-waste dumping. In Agbogbloshie, Ghana, a BAN report found that a free-range egg contained toxins at a rate more than 200 times above European food safety standards.

Several countries have come together to prevent the dumping of e-waste on other countries. In 1989, a United Nations treaty known as the Basel Convention was set up to regulate the export of hazardous material. The convention, which BAN is named after, requires a country to consent before being sent waste, and to dispose of junked electronics in an eco-friendly way.

Environmental activists pushed for an amendment to the convention that would fully ban some of the world’s richest countries from sending their electronics to developing nations. The amendment still isn’t in effect, but some countries have taken major steps of their own accord to better curb the e-waste trade. The United States isn’t one of them.

America is an extreme producer of e-waste, but has done next to nothing about regulating it. Despite signing on to the convention, the country has failed to ratify it, and nearly all e-waste can be lawfully shipped overseas, more than 30 years after the first countries agreed to abide by the Basel Convention. America has “this distinction all the time of being the jerk in the room,” Scott Cassel says. Europe, by contrast, has much stricter rules about how manufacturers dispose of the electronics they produce. States have taken on some of the burden, and about half have passed some form of law regulating electronics dumping in the country.

BAN went to China in 2001 and later issued a report on the town of Guiyu. The nonprofit recorded footage of children alongside burning waste and mountains of discarded electronics. The workers would set parts on fire, melting away the worthless material until they could find bits of precious metals — traces of copper or gold buried inside devices. The workers were being poisoned in the process.

About a decade ago, BAN hit on a way to more closely track the spread of waste. It was clear it was being sent from the US overseas, but who, exactly, was sending it there?

Working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the group came up with an idea: attach GPS trackers to pieces of waste and follow the stream as it flowed around the world. In the years since, through a series of documentaries and reports, BAN has exposed the scope of the e-waste problem, and as the world’s dependency on electronics keeps growing, the group’s work has only become more urgent.

There have been just a few federal prosecutions over e-waste exporting, as prosecutors accuse recyclers of crimes like fraud and obstruction, and the Basel Action Network seems to have had a hand in all of them. In 2016, an Illinois recycling executive was arrested for sending toxic e-waste to landfills or reselling it to other buyers, following a BAN report. Earlier this year, he was sentenced to three years in prison, after pleading guilty to tax evasion and fraud. BAN, working with 60 Minutesin 2008,also exposed a recycler called Executive Recycling that was secretly exporting e-waste. Company executives eventually reached plea agreements with prosecutors on fraud charges.

But how shouldthe recycling system work? What does a responsible world look like? When I ask Puckett, he gives a surprising answer. “Let’s put it this way: it’s not supposed to work,” he says. “This equipment was never designed to be recycled, which is why we have such problems.”

Ideally, he explains, electronics could be easily broken apart and recycled. Instead, workers have time-consuming work to do, pulling apart the electronics and breaking them down with expensive machinery, then selling what they retrieve to other businesses. Recyclers remain at the mercy of the rare metals market. Some companies and governments will only work with recyclers that are certified as eco-friendly, but it’s not hard to cheat.

When he made it to Hong Kong, Puckett’s plan involved telling “a little white lie.” In the past, he had pretended to be a professor researching recycling. That hadn’t worked out so well. This time, along with a TV crew, Puckett posed as an electronics buyer, banging on the doors of makeshift recycling compounds in Hong Kong until someone let him through. “We were very good at getting in, because we learned that in China, money talks, and if you say you’re there to buy equipment, you can get in,” he says.

Inside the work sites, Puckett drudged through mountains of printers, circuit boards, and LCD screens. The working conditions were horrendous. In the video, produced by PBS, a translator can be seen asking workers whether they wear any masks. They didn’t, despite handling potentially poisonous tubes of mercury. One worker said he had no idea the tubes were dangerous.

Puckett tracked down boxes of Total Reclaim exports, complete with the company’s invoices and corporate logo emblazoned on them. The team passed by a massive pile of gray junk, where toxic backlights had been carelessly piled on top of each other. Puckett took photographs of what he found and returned home, where he confronted Lorch again.

Jim Puckett discovers boxes bearing Seattle-based recycler Total Reclaim’s logos in an e-waste dismantling facility in rural Hong Kong. Photo by Katie Campbell, KCTS9/EarthFix

As BAN released its report, Total Reclaim issued a statement admitting to some wrongdoing. Lorch and Zirkle said they had been under the “immense pressures of a very difficult market” and “lost sight of our values.” They said they had no factual issue with BAN’s findings, but pleaded for some understanding: the company had received “a dramatically increasing volume of flat-screen devices” and “made a short-term business decision” to send the electronics to Hong Kong.

Washington and Oregon officials soon launched investigations, and after some legal wrangling, Total Reclaim settled with both states, paying out about $1 million in total. But it wasn’t until a federal investigation was through that the full scope of the fraud was discovered.

The Total Reclaim case was the last one to land on Matt Stratton’s desk. He’d been an EPA investigator for about nine years, and a federal agent in other agencies for another 15 before that. After retirement, he had plans to take a year and build a house. He tells me the investigation, which he led for the EPA, was his “swan song.”

Total Reclaim had sold the LCD monitors to a third-party shipping company, which then sent them overseas. Stratton and prosecutors pulled documents from that company, along with Total Reclaim, and pored over it all.

Eventually, he found a damning discrepancy. Shipping manifests from Total Reclaim, which had been turned over to BAN, showed the company sending “plastic mix” overseas. But the third-party shipping company had the same documents with a different item listed: flat screens. The documents had been falsified. As investigators dug deeper, Stratton says, they uncovered emails from Total Reclaim instructing the shipping company to fake its records.

“I started doing some comparison work and realized that this was a much bigger, much longer conspiracy than the state even knew about,” Stratton says. Ultimately, investigators pieced together a plan of staggering scope. According to officials, Total Reclaim sent more than 8 million pounds of flat screen monitors with mercury to Hong Kong, where, according to an EPA toxicologist report, workers were at risk of being poisoned. In the process, Lorch and Zirkle made millions of dollars, and to keep it from authorities, they stored the monitors in the Harbor Island facility, falsifying hundreds of documents to cover it all up. (Lawyers for the men dispute the amount of money made from the fraud.)

The scheme had been going on for seven years. Puckett reflected on how it could’ve happened right under his nose. “From the very beginning, when they first signed the pledge with us, they had been lying to us,” he says.

Lorch and Zirkle reached a plea agreement in the fall of 2018, accepting a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The prosecutor on the case, assistant US Attorney Seth Wilkinson, says the office considered a case under environmental laws, but that they didn’t quite fit. “We don’t have a federal law that specially prohibits sending this material overseas,” he says. “What we do have is federal laws that makes it illegal to commit fraud, that make it illegal to make material misrepresentations about something in order to get money.” Without stricter e-waste laws, it’s the best prosecutors can do.

The plea reduced the maximum penalty for Lorch and Zirkle from 20 years to five, but prosecutors asked a judge to sentence the two men to the full five. The defense asked for a more lenient prison sentence, arguing that there was no definitive link to any health consequences.

As part of the sentencing hearing earlier this year, Wilkinson called Puckett up to speak. He suggested, broadly, that recyclers sending waste overseas were responsible for deaths, and should be prosecuted as such. “It is certain that the victims are left just as dead as if they were shot by a gun,” he said.

Since the government has failed to properly regulate e-waste, Wilkinson explained, ethical recyclers have become the only option. Total Reclaim was there at the beginning, ready to volunteer on the front lines.

Puckett had some qualms. “Should I tell the judge to try not to put them in jail?” he wondered. He wasn’t a big fan of the justice system, but decided it wasn’t his place to reform it, only to explain what happened.

Still, the hesitancy wasn’t just about abstract issues of justice, either. It was personal for Puckett. People in the recycling industry and in the community continued to support Total Reclaim, reasoning that Lorch and Zirkle had learned their lesson and would keep doing good work. As part of the sentencing hearing, they produced reams of signed letters explaining what their lives and careers had meant.

In court, Puckett looked around and realized how the community had come out in support of Lorch. They had mutual friends in the industry. Suddenly, Puckett was standing alone with the prosecutors, while on the other side of the aisle were his friends. “Culturally, that’s my people, over there,” Puckett thought. But he explained in court why he wasn’t surprised at the show of support.

“No doubt, there will be plenty of Craig’s and Jeff’s friends who will send in letters testifying to what good men they are,” he said. “And no doubt, in part of their lives, they are. I know they can be generous. I know they have done good deeds. I know. They were my friends. But I also know, now, they have committed criminal acts that damaged the Earth, and made serious victims of innocent people.”

The judge, noting how long the scheme went on, said the two had years to reverse course if they’d wanted to. “Clearly, that was not isolated or short-term behavior,” he said.

The defense team had argued that the monitors shipped to Hong Kong only made up about 3 percent of Total Reclaim’s business. But this wasn’t exculpatory, the judge explained. Total Reclaim had been successful — Lorch and Zirkle could have afforded to dispose of the material properly, but chose to maximize profits instead. The judge explained that if mercury-filled material was being handled the same way in the US, it would trigger a massive national outcry. “Some of the reason for why this country faces environmental challenges is because individuals, such as both of you, made business decisions and placed business over the consequences and lives of other individuals,” he said.

Total Reclaim is still operating. In a brief interview, Lorch tells me the company had shed about half of its employees, but was trying to move forward. The judge allowed Lorch and Zirkle to partially stagger their sentences, giving Lorch a chance to right the ship as Zirkle started his time.

Lorch declined to talk about the details of the case. The past, he says, had passed, and it wasn’t worth revisiting why Total Reclaim made the choices it did. “You know, I don’t think that it’s particularly germane at this point, going back and looking at that,” Lorch tells me. “And really the company is focused on rebuilding reputation. We’ve got a lot of great customers that have not left us. We still are here.”

But they’re not alone, either. To understand how an operation works, I visit a local business called Friendly Earth. In a small warehouse, a group of workers are refurbishing and dismantling electronics. In one corner, an employee is installing software on discarded laptops. On the other side of the building, another is carefully picking through and sorting the remains of electronics dropped off by an alarm company. Enormous cardboard boxes hold circuit boards and other remains. The sound of drilling and clanging fills the air.

In August, BAN set me up to find out. At the nonprofit’s offices, I was led through the disassembly of an LCD monitor. A BAN staffer expertly removed the back casing, cut a green circuit board in two, and slid a tracker inside. An email address affixed to the front let anyone who found it know how to get in touch with the nonprofit.

Another BAN employee was sitting in the passenger’s seat while I drove us to a recycler in the Seattle area that I won’t name. I was nervous, eyeing the smartphone he’d slid into his shirt-front pocket, camera facing out, ready to record the drop. But he wasn’t worried. This was, he estimated, about his 500th “deployment.” Recyclers may be aware of BAN’s work, but even so, he explained, it’s in their interest to take the electronics offered to them. Those electronics are how recyclers make their money.

We pulled up to a garage and I grabbed the monitor, agreeing that he would do the talking. To my relief, the hand-off was almost silent. The recycler on duty motioned for me to place the monitor on a platform, and asked whether we needed a receipt. The BAN employee signed up to get one over email. As we walked away, I mused that someone might find another email address if anyone ever uncovered the tracker.

Since then, I’ve watched on BAN’s software as a blue marker has passed through Washington in Google Maps. I’ve followed it as the monitor has made its way north and stalled miles beyond Seattle. On Street View, I can see the facility where I think the device is being held. But there’s no way to see what’s going on inside.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) will raise the per-pound payments it provides to approved e-scrap companies that collect and recycle electronics covered by the state program.

Citing the rising costs of doing business, high inflation, trade impacts from the war in Ukraine and other reasons, CalRecycle decided to raise the CRT collection and recycling rate from 66 cents to 85 cents per pound and the non-CRT collection and recycling rate from 87 cents to $1.03 per pound. The changes go into effect July 1.

Under California’s Covered Electronic Waste Recycling Program, which is the oldest regulated statewide e-scrap recycling program in the U.S., consumers pay fees at point of sale when they buy electronics with screens. The state collects that money and pays it to e-scrap companies when they collect and recycle covered electronics. The program currently covers CRT TVs and monitors, LCD TVs and laptops, plasma TVs (excluding plasma projection TVs), LCD smart displays, LCD tablets and portable DVD players. After a recent decision to expand it, the program will include OLED display devices and LCD smart devices starting July 1, 2022.

The department raised the rates in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020. But the fees charged to consumers haven’t always risen accordingly. In 2020, after several years of declining weights recycled through the program, CalRecycle lowered the consumer fees to address an overly large fund balance. Over the past two years, the department has maintained the fees at the same level.

A background memo from CalRecycle staff noted that bare CRTs continue to make up the most significant weight of CRT display device residuals, but there are limited downstream outlets for them. As a result, most CRT glass in the program is disposed of in landfills, but hazardous waste landfill fees have increased in recent years.

The department also noted the impact that China’s National Sword imports restriction campaign had on e-plastics markets, as well as the Basel Convention amendment, which added controls on the scrap plastics trade. Both have reduced overseas markets for e-plastics, depressing their prices, CalRecycle wrote. At the same time, metals prices soared in 2021 and are still above pre-pandemic levels, giving e-scrap companies a boost.

While CalRecycle analyzed cost information submitted by e-scrap processors, the department’s decision this year to raise rates is based more on outside factors such as inflation and the war in Ukraine, CalRecycle staff noted.

The staff also noted the profit-margin impacts of the changing end-of-life stream, with less CRT weight and a greater number of flat-panel display devices. Last year, for the first time, the weight of non-CRT devices recycled through California’s program exceeded the weight of CRTs recycled. LCD and LED displays are lighter, have less intrinsic material value than CRTs and take longer and require more labor to dismantle.

Given all the uncertainty, CalRecycle wrote, the department suggested seeking authority from the legislature to change the payment rates more often than once every two years.

“Such a change would require additional staff resources in order to survey costs and recalculate rates, but it would reduce the perceived risk of setting payments rates for two years when economic volatility is causing anxiety for industry and government interests alike,” according to CalRecycle.

This story has been updated to make clear that the payment rates quoted above include both collection and recycling, not just recycling. The updates also note that LCD smart devices will be added to the program starting July 1, 2022.

CalRecycle staff said their recommendation to raise payment rates was based on updated cost data submitted by e-scrap collectors and processors, as well as other factors. | DAMRONG RATTANAPONG/Shutterstock

Citing difficult market conditions and rising costs for the industry, California officials will greatly increase the rates they pay e-scrap firms to collect and recycle electronics.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) will boost the combined e-scrap collection and processing rate from 49 cents to 66 cents per pound for CRTs  and from 60 cents to 87 cents per pound for non-CRT devices. The portion of those rates going to collectors will increase from 19 cents to 26 cents per pound. The new rates go into effect July 1.

Under California’s state program, which is the oldest in the country, consumers pay fees when they purchase new CRT TVs and monitors (this is not happening in today’s marketplace), LCD TVs and monitors, laptops and tablets with LCD screens, plasma TVs, and portable DVD players with LCD screens. Last year, CalRecycle set the fees at $4, $5 and $6, depending on the screen size.

The money is then paid to companies that collect and recycle covered electronic waste (CEW). The CEW payments are made to the processors/recyclers, who pay the “recovery” portion to the collectors that brought them material and keep the “recycling” portion. Under the new CRT rate, collectors will receive 26 cents and processors will keep 40 cents, and under the new non-CRT rate, collectors will receive 26 cents and processors will keep 61 cents.

State law requires CalRecycle to consider adjusting the payment rates every two years, if necessary, so that they cover the average net costs of collecting and processing.

CalRecycle staff requested the increase in documents presented at a May 19 CalRecycle public meeting. In the documents, staff said their recommendation to raise payment rates was based on updated cost data submitted by e-scrap collectors and processors, additional stakeholder input, staff analysis of industry trends, and more.

The department’s acting director, Ken DaRosa, approved the increases on May 21. The department still needs to file information with the Office of Administrative Law before the increases go into effect.

Evolving end-of-life stream: In California, the weight of CEW recycled each year has been falling as legacy CRT devices are cleared out. CRTs still make up the majority of weight, but non-CRT devices are making up a larger percentage – they made up 1% of weight in 2011 and 31% of weight in 2019.

On the cost side, CalRecycle noted that non-CRT devices are more difficult to dismantle and require longer processing times. They contain materials that are hazardous waste or require special handling, such as plasma panels and fluorescent lamps. On the revenue side, they are lighter and have less material value because of miniaturization, such as circuit boards with fewer precious metals, according to CalRecycle.

Constrained downstreams: CalRecycle also touched on the fact that processors participating in the program have few approved downstream CRT glass recycling outlets; as a result, most of the glass goes to disposal, CalRecycle noted. E-Scrap News in March took a closer look at the downstream disposition of CRT glass from the program.

The department also described how China’s National Sword campaign ultimately reduced export markets for e-plastics. China curtailed scrap plastic imports as of 2018, prompting a number of Chinese plastics reclaimers to set up shop in Southeast Asian countries. But they couldn’t replace the capacity lost when China closed the door; additionally, many of those Southeast Asian imposed import restrictions of their own after their ports became jammed with containers of scrap materials.

“The effect of this is considerably depressed plastics prices,” CalRecycle wrote. “In addition, metal commodity values have been going down since 2018, further reducing recycling revenues.”

Coronavirus impacts: Lastly, regulators touched on how the COVID-10 pandemic has affected the industry, as well as uncertainty going forward. They noted that the crisis has reduced the amount of CEW entering the system, driven down spot prices for metals, and further limited export options.

“It is unknown at this time how long this current crisis will last and what overall effect it will have on the costs of collecting and processing CEW,” according to the backgrounder.

Last month, Roy Dann of Cal Micro/GLS Group, which participates in California’s program, described to E-Scrap News the difficulty of low ferrous and nonferrous prices, coronavirus lockdowns in Asian countries that import e-plastics, and difficulties even getting containers to export material. His company, which mostly ships recovered commodities out of the Port of Long Beach, kept having its bookings cancelled, he said.

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Until recently, I had never really thought about what happens to my old electronics. I took them to a community e-waste recycling drive, or dropped my old phone in a box somewhere, and I assumed my stuff was recycled.An alarming portion of the time this is not actually the case, according to the results of a project that used GPS trackers to follow e-waste over the course of two years. Forty percent of all US electronics recyclers testers included in the study proved to be complete shams, with our e-waste getting shipped wholesale to landfills in Hong Kong, China, and developing nations in Africa and Asia.

The most important thing to know about the e-waste recycling industry is that it is not free to recycle an old computer or an old CRT television. The value of the raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics is worth less than it costs to actually recycle them. While consumers rarely have to pay e-waste recycling companies to take their old electronics (costs are offset by local tax money or manufacturers fronting the bill as part of a legally mandated obligated recycling quota), companies, governments, and organizations do.

Or at least, in a rational market, your office would have to pay an e-waste recycler to take their old stuff. But an astounding amount of US electronics recyclers will take old machines at no cost or for pennies per pound, then sell them wholesale to scrapyards in developing nations that often employ low-salary laborers to dig out the several components that are worth anything.Based on the results of a new study from industry watchdog Basel Action Network and MIT, industry documents obtained by Motherboard, and interviews with industry insiders, it"s clear that the e-waste recycling industry is filled with sham operations profiting off of shipping toxic waste to developing nations. Here are the major findings of the study and of my interviews and reporting:Real, environmentally sustainable electronics recycling can be profitable only if recycling companies charge a fee to take on old machines; the sale of recycled materials rarely if ever covers the actual cost of recycling in the United States.

Companies, governments, and other organizations have a requirement to recycle old machines; because there is little oversight or enforcement, a secondary industry of fake recyclers has popped up to undercut sustainable recyclers. These "recyclers," which advertise themselves as green and sustainable, get paid pennies per pound to take in old TVs, computers, printers, and monitors. Rather than recycle them domestically, the recycling companies sell them to junkyards in developing nations, either through middlemen or directly.

These foreign junkyards hire low-wage employees to pick through the few valuable components of often toxic old machines. The toxic machines are then left in the scrapyards or dumped nearby.

Using GPS trackers, industry watchdog Basel Action Network found that 40 percent of electronics recyclers it tested in the United States fall into this "scam recycling" category.

"These companies are misrepresenting what they do and they"re deluding the public," BAN Director Jim Puckett told me. "They"re telling people that they"re recycling waste in the US properly, that they"re diverting e-waste from landfills but what they"re doing is blatantly lying."

Late last week, BAN and MIT published the results of the project, in which investigators stuck small GPS tracking chips into 205 pieces of e-waste (152 total "donations" to electronics recyclers, some donations contained more than one machine), including old CRT televisions, printers, and LCD screens. They found that 40 percent of those 152 deliveries ended up in other countries, passing through a total of 168 different "identifiable recyclers."BAN is an nongovernmental organization that was created to make sure countries are adhering to the Basel Convention, a 1989 international treaty that prohibits the exportation of hazardous waste from developed countries to developing ones. The US signed the treaty but never ratified it.The study found that in many cases, electronics recyclers that said they were seeking a "zero landfill" goal were actually not doing any recycling at all and instead were simply selling e-waste to other companies or were exporting it directly to Hong Kong or China themselves."There are people in China who will pay you pennies on the pound, so it"s an economic decision," Puckett added. "It"s more profitable to export, so that"s what they"re doing."

A service called Peony Online serves as a scrap and e-waste price list and marketplace. Motherboard obtained a price sheet from June that showed dozens of middlemen in the United States who would be willing to buy e-waste in bulk. Prices range from between $.19 per pound for an old cable boxes to a quarter a pound for old computers, to $.16 a pound for landline telephones and $.03 a pound for printers. Large LCD TVs and monitors were selling for $7.50 each. Considering that an estimated 1.25 million tons of e-waste goes through electronics recyclers in the United States every year, those numbers can add up.

A common email from would-be e-waste importers. This one notes that they have paperwork that will help a company pass R2 certification (I have not confirmed whether this company is in fact able to help make an export legal under R2).

"These guys, they have a few guys operating forklifts and not much else," John Shegergian, CEO of Electronic Recyclers International, the largest e-waste recycler in the US, told me. "They"re not worried about OSHA, or EPA, or other groups because they just throw this stuff in shipping containers without overhead or labor. They have no investment [in recycling equipment], no labor, so it"s all profit to them."There are two types of electronics recycling certifications that the Environmental Protection Agency recognizes, both of which are actually administered by nongovernment organizations. The most common one is called R2; the other is called "e-Stewards" and was created by BAN. e-Stewards is an inherently stricter standard that requires companies to act as though the US had ratified the Basel Convention. The study found that companies with an R2 certification export raw e-waste at a higher rate than even those companies that have no certification at all. e-Stewards exported at a lower rate, but were still in some cases found to be involved in supply chains that exported e-waste to developing nations.

SERI, the group that administers R2, noted in a letter published by the group in July noted that a lot of raw e-waste can be exported legally and according to R2 standards if it is labeled for "re-use" in a foreign country: "Although they represent a small minority, too many recyclers are willing to illegally mislabel shipments of electronic junk as "reusable" in order to get the shipment through customs." BAN, however, noted that 96 percent of the exports found in its study were illegal either by US standards or in the country importing the waste. In an email, SERI executive director John Lingelbach told me the organization is looking into using GPS trackers in the future."SERI is continuously looking at ways to improve conformance to the standard and is currently evaluating the use of GPS trackers and other strategies," he said.In theory, companies need to at least notify the EPA if they are planning on exporting CRT televisions, but a 2008 Government Accountability Office report found that there are many "exporters willing to engage in apparent violations of the CRT rule, including some who are aware of the rule … EPA has done little to ascertain the extent of noncompliance."

Puckett says little has been done since then to get the problem under control. The EPA has not been willing to use GPS trackers, which, he says, is the only way to determine how much e-waste is leaving our shores. The most recent EPA study on the subject, published earlier this year, found that "the accreditation, certification and implementation process of the R2 and e-Stewards standards is working well." The study, however, was based only on interviews, surveys, and an in-person audit of just nine recyclers nationwide. No tracking devices were used to determine where the e-waste was going.

"We went to a meeting when the government was thinking about doing these tracking studies—we were there and the scrap industry was there. And even in that mixed group, when the EPA asked about the most effective way to track illegal exports, the group told them to use tracking devices," Puckett said. "They told them what to do and government ignored it. They chose not to do it so we thought, "What if we did it?""The New Territories

Using the trackers, BAN found that the vast majority of e-waste that leaves the United States goes to junkyards in an area of Hong Kong known as "The New Territories." BAN describes the New Territories as a rural area filled with "furniture factories, scaffolding vendors, large metal fabrication, auto and bus body workshops, illegal gasoline vendors, a great deal of general import and export staging, and a very high percentage of electronics junkyards.""There is no such thing as free recycling. Responsible recycling costs money."According to BAN, workers at these junkyards are paid about 60 cents per LCD monitor that they break down, and the rest of it is just tossed into the scrapyard.

"The majority of waste observed originated from the US," the report noted. "Indeed, it was challenging to find evidence of non-US waste … close visual inspection easily revealed asset tags linking e-waste as previously belonging to US schools, police departments, jails, hospitals, libraries, and numerous government institutions."

The prob