I'm Lucy Biggers and this is One Small Step.
The first step in recycling old electronics is finding a drop-off site.
Many big box electronic stores like Staples & Best Buy accept old electronics
but check online to be sure they take what you’re dropping off.
Today, I'm heading to the 12,000 sq ft Gowanus E-waste Warehouse
run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center in Brooklyn.
They're the largest collector of e-waste in New York City and they collect 1 million
pounds of electronics each year.
The electronics are sorted into three categories.
Newer, working items can get refurbished and resold at their store.
Unique electronic antiques stay in their prop collection at their warehouse
and get rented out by television and movie production companies.
And outdated or damaged electronics are packaged in big pallets
and sent to a recycling plant to get shredded for their parts but
Materials like lead, mercury, chromium, cadmium and brominated flame retardants
They can do serious damage to your body if they were to leach into ground water.
Not only that our old electronics are valuable.
The EPA says that 6000 used cell phones yields $15,000 in precious metals
And the UN calculated that the materials in E-waste worldwide are worth $64 Billion US dollars.
So what about batteries?
It turns out the alkaline batteries like these are actually not toxic
but Christine told me you should always drop them off to a recycling facility.
And the batteries you really want to be concerned about
are the rechargeable lithium ion batteries
that are found in your phone and computer.
Not only are they toxic, they’re also dangerous. They're responsible for fires at dumps.
Luckily for us New Yorkers, there's a law that every retailer that sells these lithium-ion batteries
has to take them back for recycling.
In total 25 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring some form of electronic recycling.
After all your electronics are collected they’re shipped to one of the 250 e-waste recycling
facilities in the U.S.
Today we’re in Philadelphia at an e-waste recycling facility run by Covanta.
Some items we'll disassemble by hand.
Other items we'll run through a shredder.
When we shred material it goes in as a printer.
It'll come out as three different commodity streams when it's shred
one item is a ferrous metal which is
just an iron-based metal.
The second stream is non-ferrous metal so things like copper and aluminum.
And then the third stream is just plastic.
After items are shredded and separated by commodity
they’re sold and turned into new products.
One of our favorite things right now actually is shred plastic from printers
we're actually segregating that plastic and we're sending it back to an electronic manufacturer
Who, one of their third parties, actually makes it into new plastic
for new printers.
These international markets are really slowed down and aren't taking them anymore.
So that's causing a lot of problems for municipal recycling programs and into e-waste as well.
We wouldn't want to just lose the resources and throw them away.
The plant we visited is well regulated
but not all recyclers are made equally.
A recent study by recycling watchdog group Basel Action Network
placed GPS trackers on old electronics and turned them into recycling sites in the U.S..
People calling themselves recyclers in this country don't do much recycling.
They would rather put it on a container ship all this waste and ship it off to places like
China and Africa where things take place in a very dangerous, polluting way.
They can call it recycling but it's really very dirty
and it's really
Puckett and his team created a certification called E-stewards
They're audited and they're checked and we do unannounced inspections.
We put tracker's into their stream so we know they're doing the right thing.
When researching an electronic recycler look for the E-stewards mark on their website.
Recycling electronics is a costly and effort intensive business and our e-waste problem
is only going to get worse.
Globally we produced 45 million tons of electronic waste every year and that number is expected
to increase by 3-4% annually
One resource is EPEAT.
Businesses are also slowly starting to take more responsibility for the products they make.
One example is Apple’s take back & recycling program of the iPhone.
Experts believe we could see this circular model of recycling, increasing in the coming years.
The more that the products are designed with recycling in mind or reuse then that would be helpful.
Hey guys! I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you did, please share it and we'll see you next time.