SEATTLE, Washington -- Twenty years after it entered the mainstream of American society, recycling is still a partly filled glass. Whether it appears half-full or half-empty depends on if you are collecting the glass or remanufacturing it.
Representatives from local and state governments, nonprofit recyclers and the waste management industry -- an estimated 1,200 people -- attended the 20th annual congress of the National Recycling Coalition. Topics have ranged from ways to cut garbage down to zero to dealing with the hazardous leftovers from the constant growth of computer power, including mercury-tainted mother boards and leaded glass from monitors.
In the conference rooms, government recycling officials and their nonprofit counterparts have been discussing strategies for convincing consumers to consume less. But in the exhibit hall, companies are touting everything from reprocessed-denim rulers to patio furniture and decks made from plastic wrap and discarded soda bottles.
Coping with the steady stream of outmoded computer equipment has become a prime topic for discussion at this year's event, with no fewer than five workshop sessions dealing with the issue to one degree or another. Many of the old computers end up in commercial landfills, where they can contaminate the soil and leach poisons into the groundwater.
Scott Cahail, assistant director of Kansas City, Missouri's Environmental Management Department, said the issue of dealing with dead computers is a question of who should take responsibility for disposing of them.
He said session participants are looking at the European approach, which mandates that the producers make provisions for disposing of the products and their packaging either by taking back the items at the end of their productive lives, or funding their disposal directly. One advantage to this approach is to encourage companies to deal with the problems up front by giving them a financial incentive to reduce the amounts and types of waste they will ultimately have to cope with.
"People are going to have to pay" the disposal costs on one side or he other, he said. "The fee for monitors is basically the cost for demanufacturing, mostly for the leaded glass." The estimated charges, he said, run from about $12 to $20 per monitor.
The federal government, a major source of antiquated computer equipment itself, has been working with the private sector to find ways to reuse and recycle old computers and electronics components. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, over the past year, The Oak Ridge National Recycling Center has recycled more than 1,300 metric tons of obsolete electronics, boasting a more than 96 percent rate of reuse or recycling of the materials they receive.
Old hard drives and some circuit boards are resold for use in new equipment. Unusable circuit boards and small plastic parts, usually made of high-density polyethylene, are ground up into chips and melted for reuse. Precious metals are separated from the mix by a process known as "fire assay." And screws, clips and fasteners are sorted with magnets into ferrous and non-ferrous piles for recycling. Most of the leaded glass from the monitors can also be remelted and reformed to make new picture tubes.
Unicor, the commercial name for the Federal Prison Industries, has gone into the business of remanufacturing toner cartridges for more than 100 models of printers, fax machines and copiers, which they sell for up to half the cost of new ones.
Since they are remanufactured, rather than just refilled, they can claim quality as good or better than the originals. And, thanks to their connection to the Justice Department, it is against federal law for the manufacturer to void a warranty for using "properly remanufactured" cartridges like the ones they are selling.
Computers are not the only thing being "demanufactured" to reuse the component parts. Even old buildings are being carefully dismantled so the materials can be used for new construction projects.
Added to that are a whole range of organic and recyclable building materials, including marble-like countertops made from recycled newsprint and soybean flour, and interior walls made from compressed wheatstraw or recycled gypsum-board.
In all, the NRC reports, recycling has become a major industry in the United States, accounting for approximately the same number of jobs as the auto industry and just slightly fewer than computer makers and food manufacturing.
The reuse industry ranges from local thrift stores and antique shops to computer demanufacturers, pallet rebuilders and materials exchanges.
Nationwide there are more than 56,000 public- and private-sector facilities with an annual payroll of $37 billion and taking in $236 billion in gross annual sales. The largest sectors are paper, with close to 140,000 employees and $49 billion in annual receipts; steel mills, with over 118,000 workers and $46 billion in estimated annual receipts; and recycled plastics converters, employing nearly 178,000 people and bringing in $28 billion in annual receipts.
At the plenary session on Tuesday morning, corporate executives talked about a business ethos they described as a "triple bottom-line" -- placing equal emphasis on economics, equity and the environment.
Fetzer Winery chief Patrick Healy said his company had taken those principles beyond their own walls, convincing their box supplier to make a carton that used less cardboard while maintaining the same strength and encouraging the growers they buy from to grow organic grapes.
"It's encouraging to see businesses that are interested in being environmentally responsible, rather than just profit-minded," said Emily Langerak, an environmental educator from Clackamas, Oregon. One thing she said she would take away from the conference was a "fourth R" for "Rethinking" -- to go with the recycling community's "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" motto.
