The American Chemistry Council (ACC) has formed a group to promote plastics-to-oil technology, which a number of firms have been exploring to monetize material, including e-plastics, that would otherwise be sent to landfills. Housed inside ACC's Plastics Division, the Plastics-to-Oil Technologies Alliance will work to support public policy and awareness efforts within the plastics-to-oil landscape.

The Coalition for American Electronics Recycling (CAER) recently announced that Arrow Value Recovery officially joined the group in its effort to pass the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (RERA). While it may seem odd for a global e-scrap player to support a bill limiting exports of e-scrap, an Arrow VP said in practice such legislation aligns with the firm's business model and makes economic sense for the industry. "By having e-scrap de-manufactured within the U.S., [RERA] will mitigate U.S.

As the industry continues to grapple with collecting and recycling lead-heavy CRT televisions, a facility in the U.K. has become the first of its kind to mechanically recycle the successor to the CRT, flat panel televisions.

The U.K.'s Environment Agency has given Electrical Waste Recycling Group (EWRG) the green light to begin accepting LCD flat panel display (FPD) televisions for recycling at the company's 100,000-square-foot Huddersfield facility.

The 11th annual E-Scrap Conference — held this week in Orlando, Florida — concluded with a debate on the pros and cons of potential national legislation on electronics recycling. Eric Harris, ISRI director of government and international affairs, argued the bill as currently written would be a burden on processors and impede the growth of the scrap recycling industry.

Last week E-Scrap News reported on several warehouses in Arizona and Colorado where large amounts of CRTs were left behind when the plants closed. Two firms — Dow Management and Luminous Recycling — shut their doors, leaving as much as 10,000 tons of CRTs and CRT glass. Now E-Scrap News has learned of an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore containing approximately 3,000 Gaylord containers filled with CRTs.

As part of an investigation into CRT glass recycling markets, E-Scrap News has learned that recycling processors in several states have abandoned operations after charging CRT suppliers and filling up a handful of warehouses with more than 10,000 tons of CRTs and CRT glass. State officials are now struggling with how to manage these problems. Possibly the most serious of the abandonments is the closure of Luminous Recycling in Denver. Two environmental experts who have toured the site say that the situation inside the warehouse is very serious due to extremely dusty conditions.

Another sentence has been handed out in the U.K.'s largest-ever bust of illegal e-scrap exports.

A British court ordered Terence Dugbo to pay roughly $141,000 in fees and penalties for his role in an effort that illegally sent scrap from the U.K. to Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan. The U.K. Environment Agency in 2008 started a lengthy investigation into a large exporting scheme that to date has resulted in more than $486,000 in fines and a host of convictions.

A three-year-old e-scrap firm in Wisconsin says it is opening its newest plant elsewhere because permit requirements at home have held up its plans for a CRT processing operation.

In an interview with E-Scrap News, an executive at Arrow Value Recovery says the company will complete its global implementation of the e-Stewards standard at all of its facilities by 2015, and a spokesperson offers new insight on the special circumstances involved in certifying the company’s many locations. For the past three years, Arrow Electronics has aggressively entered the IT asset management and reverse logistics sector, building on its already successful electronic components and IT services offerings.

Automated retail company Outerwall, formerly Coinstar, has announced it will acquire kiosk-based electronic buy-back company ecoATM for $350 million in cash.

Outerwall, which owned 23 percent of ecoATM, now takes charge of 100 percent of the San Diego, California, startup. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of 2013 and will be accretive to EPS in 2014.