News

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.

Multinational electronic components supplier Arrow Electronics has reached a three-year agreement with the Basel Action Network to certify all of Arrow's electronics recycling and IT asset recovery operations worldwide to the e-Stewards standard. The pilot program makes Arrow the first company with locations on multiple continents to bring the certification to all its operations.

Ontario’s Environment Minister Jim Bradley last week introduced a new Waste Reduction Act and Strategy, which would make numerous changes to the province’s solid waste and recycling management, including doing away with controversial eco fees on electronics purchases.

The long-awaited Waste Reduction Act would replace the 2002 Waste Diversion Act and make some significant changes to how Ontario’s solid waste and recycling program

Nearly 959 million smartphones will be shipped in 2013, according to the latest estimates from International Data Corp. The 33 percent year-over-year increase in global shipments also represents the first time that smartphone shipments will eclipse conventional cell phones, according to IDC.

A U.S. ban on the export of some types of e-scrap to developing countries could create as many as 42,000 new jobs — at least according to a new study commissioned by the Coalition for American Electronics Recycling.

The study, which was conducted by DSM Environmental Services, Inc., surveyed current CAER member companies and estimated employment at 6,850, with a payroll of approximately $250 million.