Story originally printed in the Coulee News or online at www.couleenews.com

Published - Tuesday, July 01, 2008

La Crosse County on the frontier of recycling electronic waste

By RYAN STOTTS | Lee Newspapers

Don’t throw away that old television, computer or video game. It’s more valuable than you think.

Dealing with e-waste — in particular, recycling the components found in electronic equipment — is something

La Crosse County excels at, said Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem.

“I don’t think everybody knows how advanced La Crosse County is,” Huebsch said. “We’ve got a great program that’s moving forward. They’ve anticipated rather than reacted.”

What the county anticipated was a huge influx of electronics due to federal tax rebate checks and the February 2009 switch of television broadcasts from analog to digital signals, said Jeff Gloyd, manager of the county’s Household Hazardous Waste program.

“I think we’re prepared for it,” Gloyd said.

The program this year likely will take in 250,000 pounds of e-waste, he said, and could serve up to 5,000 residents.

“Electronics were always on our radar screen,” Gloyd said. “We just had to make sure we had an infrastructure to support it.”

The county’s e-waste collection program for residents and businesses has proven popular since it started in July 2006, Gloyd said. The county strips TVs and computers of their components and sells them to a recycler.

“There aren’t a lot of county operations in the country that have a de-manufacturing process,” Gloyd said. “Maybe more county departments should do this.”

While it’s not illegal for residents to place electronics at the curb for pick up, Gloyd said, those will be buried in the county landfill. That means some hazardous materials, such as mercury, cadmium and lead, have the potential to pollute the ground, he said. It also is a waste of copper, circuit boards and plastics that can be reused.

“Most people understand the hazards and the reuse potential,” he said of curb disposal. “They don’t do it.”

There is a cost to bring items in for recycling: 20 cents per pound for all e-waste, and 35 cents per pound for TVs, Gloyd said.

It takes e-waste workers about four or five minutes to break down a television and separate materials into bins so they can easily be sent off for recycling.

Next stop: E-recyclers

A company called Dynamic Recycling takes the separated materials from the county and sends them to various scrap yards.

Miles Harter, director of business development for Dynamic Recycling, said the program is one of the best in the state.

“They call us when they get a truckload of stuff,” Harter said.

“In the past, they didn’t break down anything, but now they rip a lot of it down themselves. You get more value out of the materials when they’re stripped down into clean commodities.”

The gutted parts are sent off to specialized scrap yards for reuse in new electronics, he said. The most sought-after items, he said, are high-grade circuit boards, such as those in computers “because there’s gold, silver and soldering tin, and gold is really the most valuable thing right now.”

Items that aren’t stripped go to shredders in the U.S. and Canada where machines break everything down, but it’s not as clean as doing it by hand, he said.

“We’re at a different level than most scrap yards,” Harter said. “We’re concerned with the environment, more so than a scrap dealer. We don’t base it on pricing. We do what’s best for the environment.”

The county and Dynamic Recycling basically have a break-even arrangement, he said.

That’s fine by Gloyd, who said being efficient and environmentally safe is more important than turning a profit. It also means the county can keep its fees low.

“We’re doing as good a job as we can to look for cost-cutting measures for the taxpayer,” Gloyd said.

Retailers on the e-waste bandwagon

Retailers have started to join in on e-waste removal.

Best Buy in Onalaska began taking old TVs and computers the first week of June, said Brad Reed, assistant store manager.

“The company started it with just a few stores,” Reed said. “I don’t think they expected as much as they saw. The first week was insane.”

Anyone can bring in up to two items per day, Reed said, with a 32-inch screen limit. No purchase is necessary to drop items off, he said, but Best Buy won’t take older console TVs, appliances or microwaves.

“It’s a pretty wild experience,” Reed said. “We saw people we’ve never seen before come in the store ... it hit really hard at first, and now it’s kind of slowed down. But our customers love it. It’s been really good for us.”

So good, in fact, the program has been expanded indefinitely.

“It’s probably costing us more than anything, but the benefit is people are getting rid of their old electronics and they get to have the shopping experience,” Reed said.

Wettstein’s sales manager Bruce Swanwick said the downtown La Crosse store has a similar program. The pickup service costs $19.99 per stop, but the pickup has to be in conjunction with a separate purchase and delivery from the store.

Swanwick said said he’s met with Sony representatives about establishing a local drop-off site for e-waste in the store’s parking lot.

“I’m always interested in promoting programs that benefit the business and the community,” Swanwick said.

Legislation next?

Add state government to the list of those concerned about e-waste.

“Electronic waste contains a lot of valuable materials,” said state Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, “but also a lot of toxic ones.”

Miller introduced a bill in 2005, patterned after a Minnesota law, that would require manufacturers of electronics with display screens to pay a recycling fee based on market share. The bill, which wasn’t voted on in 2005, will be reintroduced in January.

“This is a public policy whose time has obviously arrived,” Miller said. “Efforts in the past haven’t worked well — ones that have imposed fees to the consumer at the time they want to recycle the materials.”

Garth Hickle, Minnesota Pollution Agency product stewardship team leader, said his state’s program has been successful.

“Just based on the amount of material that’s been collected, there’s quite a need for recycling options for the consumers,” Hickle said, “and there’s a greater need than we thought out there.”

The Minnesota law took effect in July 2007, and Hickle said the state expects to have collected about 25 million pounds of e-waste — far exceeding the manufacturers’ obligations.

“We’ve had quite good compliance and support from local government, recyclers and manufacturers,” Hickle said.

Though he hasn’t looked at it in detail, Huebsch said the bill might be a good idea — and it’s a discussion the Legislature needs to have.

“It all comes to down to the funding source,” Huebsch said. “The manufacturers certainly should shoulder some of the cost, but if that is the sole funding source, they won’t be paying for it, the customer will.”

La Crosse County Solid Waste Director Brian Tippetts said the Household Hazardous Waste program has plenty of other work to do, and he’d be happy if retailers and manufacturers made county e-waste disposal obsolete.

“We don’t need to offer the service,” Tippetts said. “If there’s a wealth of other providers offering the service competitively, we have other things we can take care of.”

While e-waste laws and practices are debated and refined, Dustin Wood — one of two full-time technicians at the Household Hazardous Waste program — will continue to rip apart TVs as they come in.

The first couple of sets were interesting to strip down, he said, but after that it got repetitive. He’s not complaining, though.

“It’s nice, because it’s keeping the stuff out of the landfill,” Wood said.

e-waste: The basics

Recycle e-waste at the La Crosse County Hazardous Materials Facility, 6502 Hwy. 16.