As it stands, the state Department of Environmental Management will study the issues of disposal and recycling, and determine how the law’s goals can best be met. State Representative Art Handy (D-Cranston), one of the sponsors of the e-waste law, says the lack of specification about who will pay “was a compromise to be able to start moving the ball forward.”
Ideally, says Handy, computer producers would take the machines back. “Or, we would work out some kind of system where they would pay for them to be recycled or reused.”
E-WASTE EVERYWHERE: Dormody [top] notes how the Johnston dump is not meant to be a toxic landfill, while Handy, a co-sponsor of the state’s e-waste law, points to the need for manufacturers to reuse and recycle old computers.
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How about recycling?
Computer recycling is not easy. A computer, unlike a Coke can, can’t be crushed, baled and converted back into more aluminum soda cans. There are also very few companies that do the really dirty work of e-waste recycling — smelting lead glass, and extracting metals from shredded circuits boards. Still, although the margins are tight, recyclers can potentially make money on both ends: taking away electronic refuse, and then selling refurbished machines, as well as materials mined from recycled ones.
“What we do is cutting-edge, but it’s not clean — it’s garbage, technology garbage,” says Thomas Hartford, the president and CEO of five-year-old Green-Tech Assets, which occupies 27,000-square-feet of mill space a few hundred yards from Cumberland Town Hall. The company’s warehouse is filled not just with computers and monitors, but also cash registers, copiers, fax machines, medical equipment, and telephones. Some of the items can be resold as is, but most will be disassembled and the components sent elsewhere. Viable hard drives are removed from CPUs, erased, and sold. Non-working hard drives are degaussed (essentially microwaved so as to be made unreadable) and then shipped to a processor.
Some items definitely have value, but others, principally televisions, actually cost money to get rid of. The key to making a profit is finding the right buyer and negotiating a good price. Low-grade circuit boards go for 15 cents a pound, while high-grade ones are worth 50. Plastic, of the kind that constitutes computers, printers, and fax machines, is worth 20 cents a pound when baled and sorted.
Green-Tech contracts with companies, including Stop & Shop and Ritz Camera, that wish to get rid of old electronics. The company offers its clients liability protection, both from the theft of data left on old computers, and from claims should the machines themselves wind up somewhere they shouldn’t.
Green-Tech performs the initial phase of recycling — collecting, disassembling, sorting, and remarketing materials. It does not smelt glass, nor does it extract precious metals. It sends monitors, circuit boards, and other items to brokers and processors in New Jersey and upstate New York.
Volume is essential to recycling, although recyclers usually need not look far for a supply of junked electronics. This year, Green Tech will process 14 million pounds of e-waste; Hartford says he hopes to do 20 million in 2007. The bigger players in the business, like East Providence’s Noranda, a subsidiary of a Canadian mining giant, handle more than 100 million pounds annually.
