If you need to learn one thing about recycling electronics, know this: It is important to recycle electronic materials through a credible, certified recycler. Just like any business, there are companies that are excellent and strive to do a good job and there are companies that are more concerned with making money than doing the right thing. The ramifications of choosing a bad recycling company are far reaching, from mass dumping of electronic waste overseas, to toxins leaching into groundwater and being released into the air.
Recently, the environmental organization Basel Action Network (BAN) joined with CBS News in California to expose a company that abandoned toxic cathode ray tube glass that it had been paid to recycle. Nobody from the company, Dow Management, can be found, but more than 9 million pounds of toxic CRT glass is left sitting in three warehouses in Yuma, AZ.
Most of the CRT glass is sourced from picture tubes of old TVs and computer monitors collected by California’s state recycling program. The state program paid California recyclers to dispose of this e-waste in a responsible manner. They in turn paid this third-party recycler, Dow Management, to do the same. According to BAN, “Dow was paid more than $581,000 by California Recyclers to take the glass, who were in turn paid $3.6 million from a California legislated recycling fund.”
By law, every time a consumer in California buys a new TV or computer display, he or she pays a fee that is used to pay to have the electronic waste properly recycled when it reaches the end of its useful life. And, under federal law, it is illegal to amass CRT glass for recycling for longer than one year. In the case of the abandoned CRT glass in Arizona, neither law was followed.
Source: 1-800-RECYCLING