IRN: The Reuse Network

Here’s an article from the Boston Globe on March 2, another article about shady electronics recycling. You can read the whole article at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/03/02/old_televisions_spark_environmental_dispute/

Nine truck-size shipping containers filled with old televisions from a Brockton recycling company are at the center of an international dispute drawing attention to a major problem in the regulation of hazardous electronic waste: When is a product intended to be reused, and when is it trash?

The containers, shipped to Indonesia by CRT Recycling Inc., were seized by port officials there after an environmental organization staked out the company’s Massachusetts operations and alerted the Indonesian government about a possibly illegal shipment of e-waste.

The cathode-ray tubes in televisions and computer monitors contain more than four pounds of lead, as well as mercury and other toxins…. An international treaty restricts shipments of these tubes for disposal in developing countries.”

“There is enough documented evidence indicating that monitors and other types of electronics shipped under the guise of resale or reuse winds up being disassembled in dangerous conditions,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There is so much documentation consumers should assume that unless the material is going abroad [to be repaired under warranty] it will be disassembled.”

Beth Daley in The Boston Globe, March 2, 2010

It would be really nice if these stories were to disappear. But they don’t and they won’t. As long as there’s money to be made shipping electronics offshore to be “reused” or “recycled”, they’ll be shipped offshore. Mark Lennon wrote about that a few years ago. In light of this most recent Globe article, we think it’s worth reprinting:

Electronics Recycling: A Divide With No Way Across

Some ancients will remember Evel Knievel and the Snake River Canyon. Evel tried to jump the canyon and ended up in the drink. There was no way across.

There’s a Snake River Canyon in electronics recycling. On one side are deals to buy old computer and monitors or take them away for free. On the other side are recyclers who charge to recycle old electronic equipment. The gap between the two sides starts at about twenty-five cents a pound and gets wider from there. And there’s no way across.

Make no mistake. If you see an offer to take monitors (or TVs or computers) away for free, or pay you for them, they will be packed in containers and shipped abroad. Maybe to China, maybe to India, maybe to Mexico. Most will get hammered apart for their metal components. They will be handled under labor and environmental conditions that are straight from Charles Dickens. Ultimately what’s left will end up in a ditch or scattered on the landscape.

The alternative – the recycling that starts at about a quarter a pound – destroys the electronics here in the United States. It recovers glass, metals, plastics, and usable components. It is subject to U.S. laws and permit requirements, with appropriate safety and environmental controls. All of this costs money. There’s just no way around the economics.

We know this is true. We have visited dozens of electronics recyclers from coast to coast and from Texas to Iowa. We have chased down the no-cost deals. We’ve visited the sites, we’ve seen the operations. We’ve seen the containers packed for export. We’ve also seen the reputable recyclers, and audited their operations as well. And there just aren’t any exceptions; if the deal is close to zero or better, the electronics are being packed into overseas containers.

Exporting electronics for “recycling” is not, in most cases, illegal. But socially, ethically, and environmentally, it is repulsive. Please call or look for links on IRN’s website, http://www.ir-network.com, if you’d like more information about what happens to electronics when they’re sent overseas.

IRN is getting the best pricing we know of for responsible recycling of monitors and other electronics. The reason is simple: IRN’s clout as a collective. IRN managed nearly 2,000,000 pounds of electronics in 2009. This makes us one of the largest accounts in New England. We get great pricing and service, and we pass those benefits to IRN clients.

If you see a “better” electronics recycling deal, please tell us so we can chase it down. If the deal’s legitimate, we need to know so we can grab that benefit and pass it along to IRN clients. If the deal’s shady, we can let you know and tell you why, but keep your name out of the conversation. We can also get you in for a site audit if that would help your decision-making. If you want to take a no-cost deal, we’ll be happy to talk about the issues and the questions you should ask. But be clear, if it’s a no cost deal, or even close to that, your electronics are headed offshore.

There is in fact a huge gulf between responsible electronics recycling and containers heading offshore. There’s no way around that. There’s no way around the difference in price, and no way around the difference in social and environmental impacts.

The Golden Rule of recycling never changes: Know Your Markets.

January 2005 was a bleak month for Boston University’s Brown Arena basketball floor. After 30 years hosting men’s and women’s hoops, after feeling the step of coaches like BU’s own Rick Pitino, Mike Krzyzewski, and Jim Calhoun, after playing under Reggie Lewis, Christian Laettner, and Grant Hill, after underpinning a tennis court for Billie Jean King, Virginia Wade and Chris Evert – it was shoved into a warehouse, pushed aside by a new floor at the new Agganis Arena.

There it sat for almost five years. In the dark, lost, forgotten.

There it would probably have sat until doomsday, except that last year BU landed a role in a movie (WHAT movie remains confidential). Hollywood needed the warehouse, Hollywood got the warehouse, and the old Brown Arena floor got in the way.

A couple of years ago, that would have been the end of the story. Basketball floor in the way; basketball floor in the dumpster; goodbye. But since 2007 BU has had a different way to handle surplus property. BU has linked up with IRN, the Institution Recycling Network. IRN matches BU’s surplus with a network of charities in the U.S. and around the world, where BU’s excess stuff is used for disaster and poverty relief. In 2009 alone, more than 142 tons of BU surplus were sent for reuse through IRN.

So when the Brown floor got in the way, BU called IRN. IRN called a nonprofit partner, Food for the Poor, who put dibs on the floor in a heartbeat. The match was made to a rural school in southern Jamaica, where Food for the Poor has been active in poverty relief for many years.

So it was that in early October the Brown Arena floor got a new lease on life. A crew of IRN movers took the floor back out into the light of day. It was packed into two shipping containers, trucked to the port of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and loaded onto a ship for the week-long sea voyage to Jamaica. There in Kingston it was unloaded back onto wheels for the short trip to Food for the Poor’s local warehouse. It sat for just a few days before it was taken out again and installed in its permanent new home in Sandy Bay, about 40 miles from Kingston.

Where it will probably flourish for another 30 years, almost certainly under the feet of more than a few Jamaican kids who’ll end up in the NCAA, the Jamaican National Team, or the Olympics.Terrier and all. BU’s logo can carry the school name proud and high. One of the essential missions of higher education is to demonstrate the possibilities of human creativity and imagination. Repurposing the Brown Arena hoops floor to benefit generations of Jamaican children lives up to that goal.

I just returned from a few days of site visits on college and corporate campuses. I found a very common situation: open top rolloff containers that were being used for the mixed debris from onsite construction and cleanup projects. When I complimented their mixed debris recycling, I got the same response almost every time. “The rolloff is trash, not mixed debris”. But when I looked, every rolloff held mixed debris that could be recycled by Ben Harvey or ERRCO or New England Recycling or another regional facility.

Either I have been doing this way too long or this is a glass half full thing. When I think trash I think commingled commodities that can’t be recycled. MSW, municipal solid waste, the stuff in my garbage can at home. What I saw in these rolloffs wasn’t trash. It was combinations of wood, metal, brick and block, insulation, roofing, gypsum, often some furniture, lots of cardboard. Trash cannot be recycled effectively. Mixed debris, the stuff that I saw, can be recycled easily. Here in New England trash costs more to landfill or incinerate than mixed debris costs to recycle. Mixed debris can significantly increase a school or company’s recycling rate; trash reduces the recycling rate.

With a little effort to keep out the worst contaminants, all of these “trash” rolloffs would be mixed debris recycling containers. Environmental benefit, waste diversion, cost savings, increased recycling rates – am I missing something here, or are a lot of campuses trashing a lot of recyclables.

IRN runs on a really dumb model: When it comes to getting stuff out of the waste stream, we try to be everything to everybody. A lot of the time we kick ourselves for trying to do so much.

But every now and then a project comes along to remind us that all the things we do aren’t separate jigsaw pieces. They fit together into a unified approach to resources, people, and economics. We’re not just helping people reuse and recycle. When the pieces come together, we’re demonstrating a new and sustainable economy.

Reality House in New York was a project like that. Reality House was an addiction clinic that closed down seven or eight years ago. They left a lot behind: Hundreds of boxes and file cabinets of documents; Dozens of computers and monitors; Hundreds of pieces of furniture. They had started and then quit fitting out a floor of office space, leaving behind metal framing and doors and wiring, and piles of other building materials.

Columbia University took over the building a couple of years ago. They rehabbed part of the building into offices. The rest was to be emptied and gutted. Columbia knew that IRN places a lot of surplus furniture for disaster relief, so they called to see if we wanted any of the stuff in Reality House.

When we saw it, Reality House was a nightmare. We couldn’t even get to the furniture, because it was jumbled with all that other crap.

Then a light went on that said, “It all fits together.” What if Columbia recovered not just the furniture, but everything else at the same time? The paper – recyclable. The computers and other electronic junk – recyclable. The building materials – reusable, and if not, recyclable. A “normal” demolition project would trash things like fluorescent lamps and ballasts that, by law, cannot go into the trash. But they can be recycled.

There was more. IRN manages a lot of deconstruction – dismantling structures to recover usable building materials. What if we deconstructed the partly built-out floors of Reality House to get building materials back into the community, and what if we used the project to train young workers in deconstruction techniques. New York doesn’t have any deconstruction crews, and deconstruction is one of the fastest growing parts of the Green Economy.

What we’d have, in short, was a project which would demonstrate that recycling does not mean just getting stuff out of the trash. Recycling means approaching used stuff in a way that seeks and finds its potential – as raw materials, as resources for people in need, as an engine for job creation and economic growth.

And that’s what we did. We teamed with Build It Green! NYC, a nonprofit that gathers and resells surplus building materials at low cost to New York residents; with Nontraditional Employment for Women, a nonprofit that works with New York’s unions to train women for skilled jobs in the construction trades; and with The School of Cooperative Technical Education, an alternative NYC school that provides at-risk students with training in trades‐based skills.

Over the course of a month last summer, IRN managed NEW and SCTE crews who removed nearly 70 tons of reusable and recyclable materials from Reality House. More than 3,000 pieces of furniture and building materials went back into New York communities through Build It Green. Two shipping containers of surplus furniture and supplies were sent for disaster relief in Nicaragua. More than 20 tons of scrap metal were recycled, along with 13 tons of paper and cardboard. The computers, monitors, fluorescents, and other universal wastes were recycled. Overall, more than 90% of the Reality House “junk” was reused or recycled; less than 10% was thrown away.

And more than 30 disadvantaged young men and women got serious job training, in a field that’s growing, where trained workers are much needed and much in demand.

Yes, so it’s dumb to try to do and be all things to all people in reuse and recycling. But it’s the nature of what we do. Recycling isn’t just getting one or two things out of the waste stream. It’s a different way of approaching the economy, it’s a big part of a new sustainable economics. It’s got a lot of pieces: deconstruction; construction material recovery; reuse; eliminating hazardous materials from the waste stream; returning multiple raw materials to productive use; training workers for a green career future. And saving money? Compared to calling in a wrecking crew, Columbia saved a bunch.

The pieces all fit together. And when they do, recycling doesn’t get any better.