If you're like a lot of people, you probably have a bunch of old tech stashed away somewhere. I have a pile of old electronics in my house. I'm an electronic hoarder. There's just a collection underneath my bed. And maybe you do plan to recycle it at some point. Maybe you don't know how. Maybe you're holding on to it for sentimental reasons. Maybe you're worried about your personal info that's left on those devices. But when it's finally time to get rid of your beat up first generation iPod, how do you make sure it's recycled properly? And what can electronics manufacturers and retailers do to help? This is PS Guide 2, Recycling Electronics.
Max is on our video team. Look at that. You won't believe what's in here. Two antique cell phones. And we wanted to figure out what happens to the electronics we don't use anymore when they're properly recycled and to get the word out. Because I feel like most of the companies that I do buy from, there's no information anywhere about what to do with your old stuff. I feel like I see a lot of the recycling symbols on things. And then there's not a lot of communication on how to recycle it or what that actually means.
Globally, humans produce more than 50 million metric tons of electronic waste per year. That's the same weight as one million Boeing 737s. Of that 50 million metric tons, only 17% gets properly recycled, which is not great because electronic devices contain a lot of chemicals that can harm people and the environment if they're not disposed of properly. And they're also full of materials that can be refined and reused instead of mined. Materials that the earth will run out of eventually. So we went to a place where e-waste is put to better use. They go to a place like this. Easy as pie. This is Electronics Recycling International, or ERI, the largest electronic recycler in North America. They securely recycle electronics in all sorts of ways, from wiping hard drives to crushing old tech in a giant shredder.
So as we walk over here, you're going to see two trucks getting ready to be unloaded here by our shipping and receiving team. Aaron Blum is the co-founder, chief compliance, and chief operating officer of ERI.
ERI exists in general because electronics are known to have hazardous constituents in them, such as lead, mercury, and other types of items. So what we do is we bring these types of materials in, we recycle them, separate them, prevent the hazards from being sent overseas or improperly handled. We also generate metals and other types of materials that can be reused in new products.
When materials come in, they are sorted by hand. These employees are a very important part of the process. We've got to remove certain items prior to it going through the shredding process. Things like batteries, inks and toners, and paper. Things that could lead to fire and contamination in that big shredder we mentioned earlier. I'm about to come up on a new laptop, y'all.
So Max, after we get through that, we're going to head down here to what we call our video display demanufacturing area. So most of the material you're going to see today is CRTs, which can last anywhere from 25, 30, 35 years.
CRTs, or cathode ray tubes, might not be manufactured anymore, but a lot of people and businesses are still getting rid of outdated devices they've been hanging onto for years. And these outdated devices have a lot in them that companies can actually repurpose in new products.
And so my question is, do these still have resale value?
They don't have resale value as an actual electronic, only a commodity value. So all we're doing is removing off the different metals, plastics, commodities, putting those back into the recycling system, allowing them to be reused in new products. May I present the circular economy.
Okay, so now it's going to get really loud over here, right?
Very, very loud. You'll notice all the employees over here with hearing protection in from that standpoint. Also hard hats.
Also hard hats.
Their shredding system separates out different materials like copper, gold, silver, aluminum, and palladium that can be refined and put back into tech. Extracting materials in these recycling streams is critical to the future of electronics. It will help alleviate mining shortages. One topic is the EV battery industry. There's not going to be enough cobalt, enough nickel, enough lithium to be mined and manufactured. We see different countries, different states with their new legislation and their standards. Hey, we're going all electrical vehicles in the next 10 years. Well, there's not enough of these materials to be virgin mined.
Oh, we got to put our hard hats on.
Oh, that's right. Finally.
Importantly, the shredders also filter out all the dangerous toxic stuff that's in electronics. The stuff we definitely don't want polluting the earth. These are going to be your LCD based flat screens. So they contain a mercury tube on the inside. So what happens here is they load these up. They go into an enclosed system. The material gets shredded. The mercury is actually removed during the shredding process and captured in the carbon bed here. It lets the machine know when all the mercury has been removed.
The mercury is dangerous and so it needs to be removed before anybody touches any of the stuff.
100%. It pains me a little to see electronics get hurt, but this is really cool. This is our second robotics that we put in our facilities. It's called SAM. So what SAM allows us to do is separate different types of materials on one of the outfeeds of the belt. So what SAM's attempting to do and doing as we see is he's sorting out the different types of material. Today it's sucking up aluminum and circuit boards.
So I'm assuming it's some sort of AI.
It's all AI. Once it finds a piece of metal that doesn't match, it sucks it up and resorts it. So now what we'll do is we'll go around to the other side and you can see the output of the product.
Let's see what gets made from this.
It's actually separated already and it goes into a little roller here and the roller is slowly putting them into each side.
As a kid I loved circuit boards, so this is like a dream come true. The final result, a sort of e-waste glitter, gets put in super sacks to be sent off to refineries for precious metal recovery.
So this material here is what we call precious metal finds, but you got a lot of value sitting in your hand right there.
I know! I got a good handful. But what about the tech that's still usable? Surely we don't want that to be turned into digital dust.
We're not getting rid of any asset, we're just cleaning them out.
That is correct. This is where devices that are still usable are securely wiped, tested, and refurbished for resale, like that phone you traded in for an upgrade. It's also way quieter over here. So as we walk over here, we talk about recycling. Well the first part of recycling is reuse. Can you reuse the actual device? Can you reuse parts or different items that are in the device? So as we see over here, these laptops are being tested right now for full functionality and also doing the data wiping. You can see over here he's actually testing the keyboard to make sure all the keys on the keyboard work. It'll go ahead and document the processor, the motherboard, the memory, give you all the data that's inside these laptops and tell you if everything's working.
Without ever having to go into the laptop?
Without ever having to go in. So when these are done being refurbished, do they go back to the box suppliers or do you sell them to people directly? So we'll do individual sales and we'll also do bulk sales. So depending on the item that we're testing, do we have 100 of these units or do we only have one of these units? We also have buyers for parts. So they might want certain processor chips, they might want certain memory. In some instances they might want the keyboard off of here, they might want the camera. Once the testing's done, it gets cleaned up and sent off to the sales team.
So I guess my question is what kinds of businesses can participate in something like this?
All businesses, all industries, all consumers. What we've battled over time is a lack of education. That's why more and more volume is not coming into the actual processes that you saw today. People at home are still unsure of what to do with their old cell phones, old TVs, things like that. Putting the education out there, providing drop-off areas and collection events for people like you and I, local businesses, to go ahead and drop off their material and in turn it'll come through a process like you've seen today.
After a very productive trip to Indiana, back in the New York office we decided to educate ourselves on the options that already exist in our area by going to our local sanitation department website, which maybe seems obvious. You see a map of every drop-off location here in New York City and some of them are closer than others. Common options we found are big box stores and others are places you can donate. We also found special waste sites and collection events. I did not know they had electronic waste recycling events and I would totally go if I knew where they were. So the good news is there are definitely ways to recycle e-waste, albeit not always convenient. If you're having trouble finding it, please ask for a garage foreman or supervisor. Anyway, the point is your favorite search engine is your friend. And if you're in a big city, there are lots of options for consumers to responsibly recycle e-waste, but there's plenty of room for businesses to better educate their customers about how to be responsible with the tech they buy and for those businesses to be more responsible themselves, like by finding ways to help people recycle e-waste in places where there are no recycling sites nearby. I definitely wish that companies did a