Electronics Recycling Asia: Formal introductions

In more than one session at the 2015 Electronics Recycling Asia event, held in Singapore in mid-November, presenters offered ideas on how to divert more electronic scrap into formal take-back and recycling channels. Currently, especially in the developing world, an informal sector of collectors and unregulated processors handles a high percentage of obsolete electronics.

Venkatesha Murthy of Singapore-based Van’s Chemistry said as little as 10 percent of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) in some Asian nations is properly handled by recyclers using safe and environmentally sound recycling methods.

Regulators in such countries are still grappling with how to properly manage their “mountains” of municipal solid waste (MSW), said Murthy. E-scrap, he said, “is something they can’t see, so it is not their priority.”

Computer and telecom OEMs, said Murthy, still “can’t find proper recycling companies” in some developing nations to carry out a take-back program. In the meantime, he urged OEMs to design for easy and safe recycling. “We must look at the big picture when we make these products,” he commented.

Darrell Kendall, the director of the RIOS (Recycling Industry Operating Standard) program at the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), said adopting the RIOS standard can be a way for an e-scrap recycler to distinguish itself in the developing world.

“I think RIOS is perfectly placed as a tool to address the informal sector situation,” said Kendall. He described RIOS as having been “developed by recyclers for recyclers” and putting a focus on environmental responsibility and protecting workers from dangers such as exposure to hazardous materials.

RIOS does not mandate best practices, said Kendall. “It doesn’t tell you how to process, [but] to evaluate and mitigate risk,” he remarked. Adopting safe practices, said Kendall, is “the foundation for everything else we’re going to ask of them in the future” as far as the standards OEMs and government agencies will expect e-scrap recyclers to meet.

Kendall said he intends to focus on one country in the developing world where, with a combination of local partners and government support, a program to make RIOS available to informal e-scrap processors can be established. “This is not a problem I can come back in two or three years and say it’s solved,” he commented. “We have decades of work ahead of us.”

Some OEMs and large electronic scrap generators are working with United States-based CHWMEG Inc. to audit and inspect the e-scrap recycling facilities they use. David Chng of the Singapore office of CHWMEG said the group conducts waste and recycling facility audits on behalf of some 275 member companies globally.

Chng said around the world there are many regulations already on the books that prohibit the unsafe and environmentally unsound handling of WEEE materials. “A lot of regulations are already there; it’s a matter of when they will be enforced,” he commented.

Private sector drivers including brand protection and adhering to producer responsibility laws are prompting multi-national companies to call upon CHWMEG to conduct audits, said Chng.

The liability of contributing to the problem can also be an incentive, he remarked. “The legal fees are now into millions and millions of dollars,” said Chng regarding Superfund and other “polluter pays” actions in North America, Europe and the rest of the world.

Electronics Recycling Asia 2015 was organized by Switzerland-based ICM AG and held at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore Nov. 10-13.