A Dumpster dive into state’s dodgy CRT recycling fee

In 2003, the SciFi Channel brought back “Battlestar Galactica.” The show was about a space colony of humans fleeing the Cylons – a race of manmade cybernetic organisms gone bad. Commander William Adama, played by Edward James Olmos, was the commander of the show’s namesake craft shuttling humans to safer climes while battling the cyborg scourge.

Many Californians who watched the show that year still did so on TV sets built around less-than-futuristic cathode-ray picture tubes.

The same year, California lawmakers drafted a bill – the first of its kind – that envisioned taking money from consumers at the point of purchase and using it to subsidize recycling of discarded cathode ray tubes – called “CRTs” – which made up about 98 percent of all e-waste by weight in the state (today it makes up about 95 percent).

Then-Governor Gray Davis promptly signed the “E-Waste Collection and Recycling Act” into law. Picture tubes can each have up to 8 pounds of lead baked into their glass, so it made sense to encourage old tubes to be smelted so the toxic glass could be recycled into new picture tubes.

It worked, at first. But over time, Californians preferred to view their space operas on back-lit panels of flat plastic, and the picture-tube market dried up. In 2016, the publication American Recycler reported that India-based Videocon was the world’s last remaining maker of CRTs. Last year, even it closed its furnaces for five months.

Virtually no recycling of the lead-laced glass has occurred recently because there’s too much glass chasing too few buyers. Yet the state still collects the now misleading “recycling fees” when consumers purchase new electronics and continues to fund the now-nonsensical program. This year, the fees will be a projected $59 million.

Of the 77 million pounds of old picture tubes turned in or thrown away last year in the Golden State, less than 5 percent was recycled, according to E-Scrap News, of the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. About 45 percent was simply dumped into landfills. The rest, as the publication WasteDive wrote, was accumulating at vague intermediate processing facilities run by companies with no reporting requirements.

What’s not accumulating – and sometimes abandoned – in America’s hinterlands is being shipped overseas for nefarious disposal. A 2016 report by the Basil Action Network said 18 percent of CRT waste from the United States is being exported to developing countries.

In 2014, Consumer Electronics Association conducted a study of 1,023 U.S. adults to determine the number of cathode ray tube devices still in U.S. households. It found about 46 percent still had at least one CRT. That’s about 7 billion pounds. That percentage is likely lower today, but it makes no difference from a recycling standpoint. There are virtually no buyers of the recycled material.

But in a move that would give pause to the most imperious fugitive fleet commander, last year, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery – aka CalRecycle – said it needed to hike the consumer recycling fees. As of the first of the year, the fee range, depending on screen size, went from $3 to $5 per new device to $5 to $7. It cited solvency issues.

So while consumers have been paying higher recycling fees – believing the money was promoting end-of-life recycling of old TVs and monitors – the state has simply been pocketing the money, and the agency still spending it utters vague mea culpas about “market forces.”

“The optics of disposal in a program that was seemingly enacted to promote recycling can be challenging,” said CalRecycle program manager Jeff Hunts to E-Scrap News. “CRT glass is just one of several treatment residuals that have encountered market complications.”

Such subterfuge calls to mind the Cylons’ sneak attack on the Twelve Colonies.

This story was originally published March 26, 2017 at 2:55 PM with the headline "A Dumpster dive into state’s dodgy CRT recycling fee."