Where does it all go?

Thought you guys might find this interesting...

A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham | Motherboard

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.

How so?

It's no secret that most of the e-scrap is going overseas for recycling. Is it really any stretch to think that the processors it's going to are just going to grab the easy stuff and dump the rest in a landfill?

Ok, a very rich gold mine produces about 1 ounce of gold per ton of crap. I would think that the amount of gold in a ton of computers would probably approach the gold per ton of a decent mine. When you figure in the rare elements and copper as well as the steel and aluminum, I would bet that it is profitable to process scrap computers and CRT's. Whatever they say, CRT's could be crushed and roughly ground to use as an additive to aggregate for cement or asphalt. I am just not buying the whole "the crap is too expensive to get rid of" story.

I feel pretty good about my primary R2/RIOS downstream, given that they are located in-state, less than 70 miles away from our facility. They do their computer/TV d-man on-site and then verify the few facilities to which they export (none in Hong Kong). They get a lot of flak for price-flooring, though, so it would appear that the social conscience's price tag isn't really a thing industry is interested in paying. I do know ERI, mentioned in the article, and they also charge quite a bit for material I would imagine they are selling. It's weird; when you see a recycler with a flashy website and lots of pictures of happy people, gloved and hair-netted, prudently nipping at assembly lines like Grand Masters of chess, it's hard to talk yourself out of trusting your own eyes. I have dealt with questionable end-of-life recyclers and processors and, short of dedicating a few weeks to hounding someone's boss's boss's boss, you might never get a straight answer or even something as simple and obvious as the certificate required in their contract. Not something most people have time to do. But I have never seen an email such as the one shown in the article, with the misspellings and like, described as being "common." Maybe you need to be processing quite a bit more than a collection point of my scale.

I used to work at a recycling depot where we charged for all electronics. It didn't seem to make any difference to people coming to drop off stuff. I think the public sort of understands that CRT's, et al, are "bad," for some reason or another and they basically understand that somebody has to pay. Our state pushed for and got EPR legislation, essentially the public saying, "somebody has to pay, LG/Sony/Panasonic/etc., and it ain't gonna be us." But the invisible force here is liability; I am told by my insurer that electronics are the #1 claim-causing material in all of solid waste. Insurance costs killed the depot I just mentioned and we only had three people working the floor. I think on how easy it must be for a potential e-waste exporter to see the cost-benefits for moving to countries where getting better from an injury is someone else's problem and there are always new workers ready to lay into the wheel when another drops.

Also, shams abound in much of recycling. Not that it validates the exploitation of global labor or bad-faith recycling initiatives but this is a more abstract aspect of this article. Electronics get special attention but really, without some other country's quasi-slaves picking away at our waste piles, recycling as we've come to know it pretty much grinds to halt. Processing technology has not kept up the pace with breadth of commercial output. Some US companies do what they can keep the loop closed (or at least on our shores) but I see more of them struggling and closing with every passing month. A older coworker of mine tells me how he used to be paid pennies to go door-to-door, as a child, and collect a wagonload of old newspapers, rags, and bottles to bring to some warehouse in town. Insert the words "in Nicaragua/Kenya/Bengladesh" in that last sentence and you can describe that same or similar work, as applies to this century.

If I go further this may turn political and that seems to be off-limits, at this point. And I don't drop mics; that's a poor way to treat quality electronics.

Took care of it for ya Breakage.

Sirscrapalot - /drop mic