BUSINESS XPANSION JOURNAL - DEC 2000

RECYCLING OLD COMPUTERS?
Here are $1.2 Billion Reasons You Should

Rachel Duran

Many companies find antiquated and stocked computer and electronic equipment on their shelves when they are in the process of moving. The easiest thing for a company to do would be to trash the equipment, right? Absolutely not.

Trashing computers and electronic equipment (telephones, cell phones, calculators, telephone systems, scanners, printers, and even typewriters) adds tons of toxic compounds to the nation's landfills, compromising air and land quality. In addition, computers or other electronic equipment dumped in a landfill can be easily traced back to the company that dumped them. That company will face huge environmental fines, among other issues.

“We did business with a company in Texas that got hit with a $1.2 billion clean up,” said Brian Brundage, CEO of Intercon Solutions, electronic recycling division, Chicago. “All a federal or government agency needs is a serial number off of a computer to see who owned it.”

There are other ways companies are fined for improper electronic equipment disposal. A company will have to pay for the proper disposal of that equipment, be it through recycling or hazardous waste disposal. The company will also have to pay the cost to remove it from the landfill or pay remediation, which covers the cost of potential groundwater contamination. That is very expensive.

How do companies properly dispose of electronic equipment? The answer is recycling the equipment with a reputable electronics equipment recycler. These companies will issue reports and certificates that outline what happened to each piece of equipment and its components. This ensures that your company has proof of where the equipment and its components went, should you ever need to demonstrate this information.

SPELLING OUT THE HAZARDS
What makes computers and other electronic equipment hazardous? There are numerous hazardous materials in computer equipment, in particular with monitors and terminals. The glass tubes in monitors and televisions, called Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs), contain between two-to-five pounds of lead. Under current Environmental Protection Agency regulations, particularly the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, it is against the law to dispose of hazardous materials into solid waste landfills.

CRTs are increasingly being legislated. Last spring, Massachusetts became the only state to officially prohibit the disposal of CRTs at all of the state's combustion facilities and landfills. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act's “Subtitle C-Hazardous Waste Program,” provides regulations against dumping computer and electronic equipment in landfills because of the hazardous materials they include, which will harm human health and the environment.

Computers also contain cathium and lithium, usually in the batteries of computers. There are also trace elements of mercury. Laptops have fluorescent lamps that create the backlight to see the image. The lamps contain mercury.

Brundage noted, “Every piece of electronic equipment has a printed circuit board in it, whether it is a cell phone, a telephone or a calculator. Eighty percent of these printed circuit boards are made of lead.” Computer dumping is going to become tightly regulated as other states follow Massachusetts' lead. One of the reasons for the tightened regulations is that the National Safety Council predicts that more than 315 million computers will become obsolete by the year 2004, which would add an estimated 8.5 million tons of waste to the nation's landfills.

THE PROCESS
Here is a quick rundown of the recycling process for electronic equipment. A recycler picks up the materials, for free, or for a price per piece of machinery. The company then sorts the machinery at it facility and begins isolating the hazardous materials and preparing the machines for recycling.

Intercon Solution's process includes melting the CRT's, instead of breaking them. The company pays to recycle the plastics, all the glass and circuit board material. Customers are issued certificates of recycling that releases them from environmental liability.

Brundage said the company averages six tractor-trailer loads a week, which are delivered to the company's Chicago 100,000-square-foot warehouse. The deliveries come from the company's warehouses located across the country. “A lot of companies have good and bad recyclables,” Brundage said. “A monitor cost us ‘x' dollars to recycle. A computer CPU has a value. What happens, in a lot of cases, is that we are able to defer the costs of recycling and then pay the customer something for the material. This doesn't happen all the time, but it does a lot of the time.”

“We put the equipment in boxes and Intercon Solutions picks them up,” said Laura Davis, technology support team for Woolpert, LLP, Dayton, Ohio, a civil engineering firm with 24 offices across the country.

“We let them deal with the logistics from our offices to their recycling centers. It doesn't cost us anything. Our account is monitored, and if the equipment the company picks up from us makes more money than its operating costs, it cuts us a check.” Brundage said that when customers realize they can get something back, the next load they send is twice as good as the first. “To us, that is important because we see that we are getting everything, and that the equipment isn't headed to the landfill.”

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