Business Week Eyes E-Scrap

An Oct. 15 article on the Business Week magazine Web site (www.businessweek.com) entitled “E-Waste: The Dirty Secret of Recycling Electronics” contends that televisions and CRT monitors are continuing to be shipped overseas in violation of an EPA rule requiring prior permission to do so.

In particular, the article says several of its sources pointed it toward Supreme Asset Management & Recovery, based in Lakewood, N.J., as a shipper of whole monitors to overseas destinations.

Business Week says its sources include former Supreme Asset Management employees who verified that the firm ships whole monitors overseas. A current Supreme employee defends the company practices and says it strictly adheres to its pledge to recycle 100 percent of what it handles.

In terms of the volume of material it handles, Supreme Asset Management ranked in second place on Recycling Today’s list of the 20 Largest Electronics Recyclers based on 2007 figures.

The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) may well be preparing to knock Supreme from that spot, however. According to the Business Week story, GAO agents have been posing as potential overseas buyers of whole monitors and televisions and Supreme reportedly was willing to sell such whole units.

If the monitors and televisions were working units, there are groups willing to defend a company’s ability to ship such reusable items overseas. However, 10 containers of “tested, nonworking” monitors were also allegedly being offered for overseas shipment.

Robin Ingenthron, president of the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A) is concerned that the actions of a few rogue companies will hamper a legitimate global market for reconditioned electronics. “If computer exporting is outlawed, only outlaws will export computers,” he remarks.

Unscrupulous shippers who “eliminate quality control from [their] payrolls” should not be the undoing of legitimate computer refurbishers in developing nations around the world, says Ingenthron. “It is possible to export professionally and in an environmentally sound manner,” he comments. “WR3A has purchase orders from vetted companies overseas, and those buyers ask WR3A to vet companies on this side of the ocean.”

The WR3A has posted a slideshow portraying its view of the difference in exporting practices at on the Web.

Another company that comes under scrutiny in the Business Week article is one that collects electronic scrap from companies in the United States, ships components into Mexico for disassembly, and then brings the scrap commodities back to Texas as a saleable product. Sources contacted at the EPA tell Business Week that the company is in need of additional permits.

Supporters of the cross-border practice contend that, if done safely and environmentally soundly, the process is simply a reverse maquiladora process, with products being disassembled in Mexico rather than assembled there.

The full Business Week article can be viewed at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105000160974.htm.