Recycling is as American as apple pie. But is it as American as Apple Inc.? Maybe so: Electronics recycling has sharply risen in the past three years, according to a recent online survey.

General recycling is at all-time high levels, with 84 percent of U.S. residents recycling their trash – helped no doubt by the widespread availability of curbside recycling programs in many communities.

But in 2010, just 39 percent of us were taking our old gadgets to be recycled. Now that nnumber has jumped to 72 percent, according to the survey, conducted by Retrevo and Bizrate Insights. The survey asked about 3,600 online buyers what they felt about various recycling practices, so it probably skews towards the demographic of online shoppers: Electronics-savvy and already fairly well-connected. Still, it’s encouraging for those of us who don’t like to think about toxic electronics leaking from landfills into our water supplies, such as the following nasty stuffs listed by the Retrevo report:

• Lead in the glass of CRTs and cadmium in the CRT phosphors
• PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) in transformers
• Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in plastics and printed circuit boards
• Arsenic in some LEDs and printed circuit boards
• Cadmium in NiCad batteries, toners and semiconductors
• Lithium in Li-ion batteries
• Mercury in some LCD backlights, and printed circuit boards
• PVC in cable insulation and other plastics; when burned they release hydrogen chloride gas
• Radioactive Americium in some smoke detectors

However, compared to the rates at which people  recycle plastics (77 percent of us do this regularly) and paper (75 percent), electronics recycling still isn’t a deeply ingrained habit: only 48 percent do it regularly.

Other survey findings: While only 31 percent of respondents always buy the greenest gadgets they can, another 23 percent feel guilty about buying less-green alternatives.

Only 42 percent of shoppers use energy ratings to help them buy the “greenest” gadgets, and young people (under 30) actually care less about these ratings than the over-30 set. That’s right, you whippersnappers: Enjoy the toxic, polluted, greenhouse-warmed Earth you will soon inherit.

Seriously, these numbers are good news. Add curbside recycling for electronics, and I think it’s a good bet that we could get gadget recycling to the same rates as other materials.

Because each year, a staggering $21 billion worth of gold and silver goes into the electronics we buy.

Gold & Silver Buyers, one of the many we’ll-buy-your-gold firms that have sprung up in the last few years, says that the precious metal content of our throwaway devices is up to 50 times higher than the ore in a gold mine. And with 50 million tons of electronics waste every year, that’s a lot of coin going in the garbage.

Urban miners can reclaim most of the 320 tons of gold and 7.5 tons of silver that is embedded into each year’s crop of iPhones and tablets by processing the waste. One of the biggest centers is in Guiyou, China, which processes 1.5 million tons a year, taking $75 million out of trash on an annual basis.

All the data, in visual form:

photo credit: Madison Guy via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BARCELONA — 1.7 billion people got a new mobile phone handset last year. What happens to the old ones? Ten million of them have been reused and renewed by eRecyclingCorps. “If subsidies are the drugs of the mobile industry, then incentivized device recycling is the methadone,” says CEO Dave Edmondson from the Mobile World Congress. 

“Those 1.7 billion phones will retain one-third of their value 24 months into their future. That is 100 billion dollars worth of economic value that we are allowing customers to walk into the shop with, walk out with, and then put in a drawer.” Edmondson contends that only 1 percent of handsets worldwide and 1o percent in the U.S. are recycled or reused. 

ERecyclingCorps works with five out of the top seven U.S. mobile operators to offer consumers discounts on a new phone or payment plan when they trade in their old device. My slightly battered 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy SII, for example, is worth around $100. “Unincentivized recycling doesn’t work, ” says Edmondson. “Customers intuitively know that the device they just made a phone call on has some value, even if they don’t know how to monetize it.” The company’s oldest customer — Sprint =- has publicly stated that for every 10 new phones it sells, four are traded in. By 2017, Sprint’s CEO wants to increase that to nine out of 10.

When a customer walks into a shop using eRecycling’s system, they are asked a few simple question about their old phone: Does it power on? Does it have a good LCD? Is there anything broken? The answers are combined with the model type to calculate a trade-in price.

Old phones are shipped to a central facility where the data is erased and they are tested to see if they can be reused. If components are damaged, the device is given a new keyboard, screen, or camera. Finally an upgraded OS and operator-specific software is installed. Phones whose parts cannot be reused are broken down so the raw materials can be recycled. But the company estimates that 80 percent of incoming devices are reused as is or renewed.

There is no agreed definition for what constitutes a refurbished phone. ERecyclingCorps has teamed up with 20 other companies to define precise standards for what it calls a renewed phone. Every time the user moves the slider up and down on a sliding phone, for example, you get wear and tear on the ribbon cable. As long as it works, most refurbishers will not replace it but to qualify as a renewed phone the ribbon must be upgraded since it is a potential point of failure.

So where do the renewed phones end up? Surprisingly, 50 percent of them as resold within the U.S. as insurance replacements, for prepaid programs or used by operators to acquire new customers at a lower subsidy cost. Feature phones often go to sub-Saharan Africa while smartphones are more likely to end up in the hands of an Indian or Chinese urbanite who could never afford a new iPhone. 

Although eRecyclingCorps is a relatively new company (it was founded in 2009), its management team could not be more different from the typical starry-eyed young startup founder. It’s populated by battle-hardened mobile industry veterans, most of whom have held senior posts at mobile operators and device manufacturers, which is not to say that they are not idealists.

“The mobile industry has grown from nothing to a trillion dollar business in 30 years by focusing on the front, ” argues Edmondson.”What’s the next network upgrade? What’s the new application? Nobody looks at the backend, which is creating the largest environmental mess in the history of the world. How many companies at Mobile World Congress are talking about that?”

Apple’s iPhone 5 fared a little better than Samsung’s S3, but all phones have eco-issues, according to a study by the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Ecology Center. In fact, mobile phones contain up to 40 elements, many of which are heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. The results were released today at HealthyStuff.

“Even the best phones from our study are still loaded with chemical hazards,” Ecology Center research director Jeff Gearhart said in a statement.

The iPhone 5 ranked fifth best, appropriately enough, while the S3 was ninth. Apple’s most recent model, the 4S, ranked second, but top honors went to the Motorola Citrus — probably due to the fact that it is both small and cheap (hence containing fewer expensive elements).

Samsung, however, had the best average rating for all of its phones.

The most toxic phones are, thankfully, not huge sellers. The Palm Treo 750, released a digital eon ago in 2007, ranked worst of all, followed by a BlackBerry Storm released in 2008. So the trend seems to be toward greener, cleaner mobile devices.

The biggest offenders are chlorine, bromium, cadmium, mercury, and lead, which can cause birth defects, impaired learning and other serious health problems, according to Gearhart. And while using the phone may not expose consumers to the chemicals, the Ecology Center highlighted the fact that these toxicity levels at e-waste recycling plants — often in China — can be 10 times to 100 times higher than normal background levels.

Here’s a visual view of the best and worst phones. Where’s yours?

photo credit: ‘PixelPlacebo’ via photopin cc

The other day I was walking through San Francisco’s Westfield Mall when I came across an EcoATM. I had never seen one before, but after figuring out what the ATM did, I wished I had been carrying around one of my many old dumb phones that will never see the light of day again. The kiosk prompted me to insert a defunct electronic device into its deposit slot. The screen said it would scan my old hunk of plastic and metal, tell me its second-market value, and ask if I wanted money in exchange for saying a final goodbye to my old device.

“We read a report from Nokia that three percent of cell phones were being recycled and felt that needed to change. So we thought, how can we make it really easy and rewarding?” said EcoATM chief executive Tom Tullie in an interview with VentureBeat.

EcoATM knows that most people want to keep e-waste out of landfills but also don’t want to part with their $500 phone and get nothing in return. In order to get more people to recycle their electronics, the company will make it worth your while to part with your old device by giving you money or discounts on new phones. If you feel really, really nice, you can donate the cash to charity.

The idea of device-recycling ATMs has gained a lot of attention from investors. Coinstar even dropped some cash into EcoATM’s bucket with an investment two years ago. EcoATM also won the Best Clean Tech Startup Crunchies Award for 2011. Investor Randy Hawks of Claremont Creek Ventures is clearly impressed.

“They’ve got a great business model, [with the] idea of having kiosks that are convenient for consumers. They are constantly updating their price estimates for devices, so you know you are getting the best pricing for your 18 month-old Android phone,” said Hawks during a phone call with VentureBeat. “They have a stellar management team and have a great way to monetize the value of old devices.”

Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, and TAO Ventures led the $17 million second-round funding, with PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital, and angel investor Koh Boon Hwee participating. The money will go towards a national rollout of EcoATM kiosks.

“[There are] 50 units in the field now, and we plan to deploy nationwide. We will be buying kiosks to deploy and building our infrastructure of sales and marketing,” said Tullie about how the company will use the funding.

EcoATM unveiled its kiosks at DEMO Spring in 2011 and has since raised a disclosed total of $31.4 million in funding. The company is based in San Diego, Calif.

In order to keep as many cell phones out of landfills as it can, eRecyclingCorps not only makes recycling easy, it makes it worthwhile by offering rewards. The company has formed partnerships with Sprint and Verizon Wireless to create “incentivized recycling” for unused wireless devices. Customers can take their unwanted cell phones into participating retail stores and receive compensation, discounts, and other rewards. For devices that are beyond repair and reuse, eRecyclingCorps properly disposes of cell phone internal components, making sure nothing ends up in a landfill. Its in store trade-in programs use a web-based platform that is integrated into store’s point of sale systems.

“In a very short period of time, we have grown this business from nothing to a company that is currently doing tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue through enabling carriers to participate in very dynamic recycling programs that make it very easy for the consumer and very easy for our carrier partners to execute the programs” said eRecyclingCorps CEO David Edmondson in an interview, “We are going to continue to expand the service to other carrier partners in North America and the first part of 2012 will be spent focusing on expanding into Europe.”

The funding eRecyclingCorps has received will be used to expand its recycling programs on an international level, especially in developing countries. It hopes to reduce e-waste worldwide and continue to supply high quality refurbished devices.

eRecyclingCorps was founded in 2009 by former RadioShack and Sprint PCS CEOs, David Edmondson and Ron LeMay. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers joins OpenAir Equity Partners and SJF Ventures as funding partners of eRecyclingCorps. eRecyclingCorps currently handles 2.5 million wireless device trade-ins per year worldwide.

E-waste is a mounting problem. Landfills are starting to brim with tossed out computers, printers, fax machines, music players, mobile phones and more. Because these electronics are made up of multiple materials — some that are more toxic to the environment than others — many former owners have no idea how to best dispose of them. Some manufacturers have even started programs allowing people to send used items back for proper disposal. EcoATM’s goal is to make this whole process easy and rewarding.

When you drop off electronics at one of the company’s kiosks, it instantly assesses their value and pays you in either cash or coupons. The stations use visual identification techniques to determine how much should be doled out. EcoATM has partnerships with 50 companies around the world that come retrieve the waste and either resell it or properly recycle the components.

Coinstar CEO Gregg Kaplan says he expects EcoATM to become a lucrative business, estimating that about $7 billion worth of used mobile phones are thrown away in the U.S. every year. Their components can be worth even more. According to SmartPlanet, about 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium are recovered from every million cell phones recycled.

Now two years old, EcoATM told Earth2Tech that it plans to roll out 200 kiosks in the U.S. by the end of 2010. Instead of installing them in supermarkets, it will probably place them with electronics retailers like BestBuy or RadioShack. This would make coupons a more compelling incentive.

Based in San Diego, EcoATM previously raised a round of funding in February led by Tao Venture Capital Partners.

To do so, they are joining an existing recycling program run by Goodwill Industries International, the same organization that collects used clothing and furniture to sell at a discount to communities that need them. Since 2004, it has also accepted used computers and related devices, recycling them for free, under the auspices of its Reconnect program.

Today, it started accepting Microsoft-made electronics like Zunes and Xboxes. Goodwill has already been working with Dell to properly dispose of its desktop and laptop computers and their peripherals.

This is a pretty labor intensive process for the organization. All deposited e-waste is inspected by employees who determine whether it can be resuscitated and resold at a steep discount. Some of these devices are even sent out to be repaired if the problem is fixed easily enough. Everything left over is broken down into components and recycled very precisely based on materials used.

So far, Goodwill reports that the Reconnect program has saved about 96 million pounds in electronics that would have otherwise wound up in landfills.

Of course Goodwill isn’t alone in its e-waste disposal efforts. Office supply stores like Office Depot and Staples also offer their own sorting and recycling services when it comes to electronics, including mice, keyboards and speakers. And Apple users can simply turn their old products into retail locations when they buy something new. But many of these programs require a fee ranging between $10 to $30.

As part of the cultural consciousness, Goodwill, already the destination for so many used goods, is a natural pick for average consumers looking to unload old gadgets. It just needs to beef up its e-waste marketing efforts to make a bigger difference. Maybe in the future, the powers behind the service, Microsoft and Dell especially, can help them out with this.

The Goodwill Reconnect service is currently available at 1,900 locations around the country. It is definitely geared more toward homeowners. Commercial e-waste producers have a lot more choices when it comes to disposing of their old electronics, including companies like CloudBlue, RecycleMatch and eRecyclingCorps.