Big Results from Electronics Recycling Day on 10/22

If you dropped off electronics to be recycled on October 22 in Beacon, you were part of the group that responsibly recycled 36,705 pounds of electronics.

This whopping 47 pallets of stuff included 13 pallets (over 11,000 pounds) of televisions,  8 pallets of appliances and 7 pallets of monitors. Where did it all go? To WeRecycle in Mount Vernon - a high-tech, automated facility that processes the electronics for recycling. Here's some photos and facts from my tour.

First, the material goes to their nearby facility for manual breakdown, where the electronics are partially dismantled by hand to make the next step more efficient. For example, plastic and wooden casings are removed from televisions. Next, the material is sent to their newly renovated and heavily automated facility employing state-of-the-art processing technology.  The goal of the operation is maximize the value of scrap electronics. On an average day, the facility processes 300 pallets of electronics and turns them into organized boxes of commodities, ready to be recycled. With their new expansion, there are 2 shifts running throughout the day, which maximizes productivity in this busy place. The next phase of the expansion will allow 3 continuous shifts to run each day, for a maximum of 24 hours of operation.

Before I began the tour they made sure I was geared up to the max, with the proper industrial safety equipment.  I was in a hardhat, goggles, earplugs, steel toe covers, and safety vest.  As soon as we started the tour I was overwhelmed with how enormous and high-tech the operation was.  Conveyor belts sent metals through magnets to separate ferrous from non-ferrous.  Other conveyor belts sent plastics through separating a machine with fans to blow lighter plastics away from heavier plastics.

Blower fans push the light plastics and allow the heavy plastics to drop below.

  Most powerful of all was the machine that crunched up circuit boards, turning them into small pieces.

Giant woven plastic supersacs are filled with materials of all types and sit labeled and ready to be shipped.

And where do they go? Metals are sold to a local scrap yard, and from there sent to mills, recyclers and smelters. The plastics are exported for processing, separated by being either light or dark/mixed resin plastic. The fragments are processed by a smelter in Europe. More can be read about their process here.

The standards used by WeRecycle are stringent - they're one of the very few E-Stewards certified handlers in the Northeast. This certification prohibits the export of toxic e-waste to developing nations, as many rich industrialized  nations have been doing in recent years. This certification came from the 1989 Basel Convention, " a United Nations treaty which was designed to prevent the global dumping of toxic waste on developing countries from more developed countries." Because the US is the only developed country that has failed to ratify the Basel Convention, it's important that we make sure we know where electronics we recycle are actually going. Again, from the e-Stewards website, "Without appropriate national and international legislation or enforcement in place in many regions, it is unfortunately left up to individual citizens, corporations, universities, cities – all of us – to figure out how to prevent the toxic materials in electronics from continuing to cause long term harm to human health and the environment, particularly in countries with developing economies."

Make sure to ask questions when you drop off your unwanted/not working electronics, and always try to reuse first. For a list of where to reuse and recycle electronics in the Hudson Valley, please see http://www.zerotogo.org/p/reduce-reuse-recycle.html.