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Looking at the Big Picture

Tourism Is the Driving Force in the Town Made Famous By Norman Rockwell
Michelle Kotek

Michelle Kotek stands outside the historic Red Lion Inn, whose 108 rooms are booked a year out for the chamber’s Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas weekend.

As digital television and flat-panel computer displays take over, what happens to the old tube TVs and monitors? While the potential for landfills to be choked with CRTs is a threat, an industry was created to handle the material responsibly. In this business, it’s known as ‘cradle-to-cradle’ recycling.

It’s one of those defining moments that, paradoxically, we’ve come to see on the television.

On June 12 of this year, the rooftop TV antenna became another quaint relic of the 20th century, as Congress mandates the use of digital-only signals. The rationale is one borne of our time, also. By eliminating TV signals from the airwaves, the broadcast spectrum can now be limited to public-safety communications.

While the shift to digital has been more than 10 years in the making, pundits have predicted a tsunami of older cathode-ray tube TVs to hit recycling centers or, worse, find improper disposal in landfills or worse, endangering groundwater and the environment.

CRT has entered the eco-lexicon with PCBs and CFCs as another bad acronym. CRTs are the picture-delivering guts for everything from the mahogany-paneled Magnavox that used to sit on the family-room floor to the pretty purple iMac that just had to be bought the first day it came out. The great picture quality that glass tube gave poses some serious challenges to responsible recycling, however.

Remember when your mother told you not to sit so close to the TV set? Well, Mom was right, to a degree. Those CRTs contain mercury and, on average, 6 to 8 pounds of lead per unit to keep the TV’s X-ray emissions from beaming through the glass.

What critics call the ‘Achilles heel’ of recycling is that the concept is great — save material from clogging landfills, keep dangerous matter from contributing to pollution — but the practice can only work if you can turn that material into something else. Plastic soda bottles might be the primary component of that fancy new fleece jacket you bought last winter, but CRTs had really been able only to make … other CRTs.

So what’s a consumer to do? Sure, that new high-definition plasma looks great for Sox games, and the new Dell desktop fits so much better with a flat-panel monitor, but what about that old tube TV in the basement? The options aren’t many, but luckily they do exist.

Adjusting the Volume

The EPA estimates that somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million televisions are dormant, in attics or garages, in homes across the nation. Since 2004, the number of TVs entering the waste stream has increased by 14%. They estimate that close to 24 million units were disposed of last year. That adds up to more than 700,000 tons.

On the state and federal levels, restrictions and regulations have made it more difficult to let these outdated devices enter the landfills. But, as the EPA acknowledges, “there are still relatively few consistent and convenient outlets for consumers to recycle old TVs.”

In an effort to assist recycling at the consumer level, the EPA issued a challenge starting on the first of this year. Called ‘Plug-In to eCycling,’ the initiative attempts to create manufacturer-based drop-off centers across the nation. Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba all have designated areas where customers can unload their old tube TVs. In some cases, the equipment is passed on to charitable organizations.

Here in Western Mass., most waste-management facilities have the ability to transfer electronic devices to a larger processing facility. You pay a nominal fee and feel better about one less TV in the dump. But then what?

John Shegerian is the co-founder and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International Inc. based in Fresno, Calif. He has been called the ‘King of E-Waste Recycling.’ “We are the number-one electronic-waste-recycling company in the nation,” he told BusinessWest, and with good reason. For several years, the Gardner, Mass. outpost of the company has been awarded the contract for all electronic waste recycling in the Commonwealth. The $50 million ERI has six locations across the U.S., and handles other state operations as well as accounts such as Los Angeles.

Shegerian’s plant in California operates the largest electronic waste shredder in the world, and he said that the plan is to build more like it at his other facilities.

“Cradle-to-cradle” recycling is what Shegerian calls his operation. “We are a zero-landfill facility. So when the stuff comes in through the front door, we have a proprietary bar coding system, and then all of the materials are sold and tracked,” he said.

Explaining the process, he said, “we bring in the CRT, separate the glass, plastics, and the metals. The glass is crushed in a hermetically sealed environment with a HEPA vacuum system, and the materials are sold to smelters all over the world for repurposing.

“Once the CRT is broken down into its constituent glass, metal, and plastic, the materials can be used in a variety of other purposes, not just CRTs,” he continued. “In the developing areas of China and India, where there is an industrial and technological revolution, their infrastructure is building out … hospitals, roads … they need these raw materials. The landfills aren’t choked, and the stuff isn’t dumped illegally like it has been in third-world nations.”

The industry is a new one, and Shegerian certainly is making the most of his pioneering role in the field. “When I started this company five years ago,” he said, “our first month of business we recycled 10,000 pounds of electronic waste. Last month we recycled about 15 million pounds.”

The College Try

Closer to home, John Pepi is known on the UMass Amherst campus as the ‘recycling czar,’ and with good reason. For the past 13 years, he has seen the volume of electronics coming into his facility reach levels that were at one time hard to imagine.

The college began setting aside computers and other electronics for reuse or recovery around 1991, well before any regulations went into effect.

Around 1999, when the Mass DEP started to enforce heavier regulations on landfills, the state also provided grant money for several regional collection facilities. UMass was tapped to be one of them.

“Up to that point we weren’t really taking electronics from municipalities,” said Pepi, “but they saw what we were doing and thought it would be useful to have a responsible and capable aggregation center in this western part of the state.”

While the grant money only lasted a couple of years, Pepi’s operation took on the recycling concerns for the region until 2007. The volume just was too much.

“We went from our own quantities of 75 or so tons to more than 200 tons of electronics in a year, for a few years,” he said. “That all came from the private sector or the local communities. What we did in the latter years of the grant, we took it in and absorbed the costs associated with such increases.

“After the grant was over,” he continued, “the arrangement we set up was as a pass-through. We take it here, we’d give the best prices around for the disposal of these items. We were able to recycle CRTs for half what the municipalities were charging. Part of that has to do with the fact that municipalities aren’t usually dealing with consumers bringing in a tractor-trailer load, so they have to charge more for the smaller amounts of consumer waste.”

But 200 tons poses a lot of challenges for an infrastructure that had been running at full steam processing half that amount. Pepi said that the concerns for the physical plant of his operations, from trucks and loaders on down to the heavy-duty scales, didn’t have the necessary funds to keep up with the wear and tear. “There just wasn’t any money to be able to replace them,” he said.

Pepi said that the business of taking CRTs has become bigger than ever, and his vigilance to separate the good from the bad is all the more necessary. “We definitely strive for our contractors, the people who take our CRTs and other hazardous material, to exhibit transparency,” he said. “You want to make sure that they have all the permits to handle mercury and lead, and that they have the appropriate staff to handle such a volume.

“There are vendors out there who will just take everything, strip out the valuable materials, and send the rest in an overseas shipping container to Asia,” he said. “A high percentage of the stuff is worthless on the reuse market, and it’s going to get torn apart in a third world country for the high-value stuff, and then the people there are going to be exposed to the trash and the dangerous effluents. There are a lot of nightmare stories that have been documented where that has been all too common.”

As the industry faces increasingly stiff government oversight, the levels of accountability rise also. Pepi said that it does make his job easier. “It’s still hard to confirm a lot of the information, but you do site visits and audit the companies yourself. It’s not easy. You still have to make some judgment calls.

“Things are moving more in the cradle-to-cradle direction,” he said. “But, still, it’s frustrating sometimes; there’s a lot of electronics that are being outdated at faster and faster speeds.” UMass, he said, is doing its due diligence to keep electronics in that responsible pipeline, and the university could be a model for others to watch as well.

Your own Magnavox might have made it from living room to India, and when you watch the documentary about third-world pollution on your HD LCD TV, you can feel better knowing that you weren’t part of the problem.