Through early implementation of recycling incentives and consistent outreach to involve the public in recycling initiatives, Vancouver, Wash. and its surrounding county have carved out a recycling rate of more than 50 percent over the past two decades. Vancouver, which is located across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., is the seat of Washington’s Clark County (population 451,000). The city...

More details have emerged on PC Rebuilders & Recyclers' bankruptcy case after a summary of the company's assets and debts was filed in Illinois bankruptcy court this week. The longtime Chicago electronics refurbishment and recycling company closed and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy earlier this month, indicating it plans to liquidate assets to settle debts. PC Rebuilders & Recyclers (PCRR)...

Washington, D.C. will join the ranks of a select few municipalities next year when it begins accepting a wider array of food-service packaging for recycling, including paper-based coffee cups. Starting Jan. 1, 2018, all residents and businesses within the district will be able - and, in fact, required - to recycle coffee cups as well as a variety of paper...

A significant retrofit at the GreenWaste materials recovery facility will feature heavy use of artificial intelligence sorting equipment and other technology. GreenWaste will install an assortment of new equipment from Bulk Handling Systems at its Santa Clara County facility, a mixed-waste processing plant that opened 10 years ago. The upgrade and expansion will double GreenWaste's capacity from 40 to 80...

New York City's waste management systems have seen a lot of change since the 1800s, when all materials were loaded onto a barge, taken into the ocean and dumped overboard. That system is currently transforming once again. The current materials management goal for America's largest metropolis is to eventually send none of its material for disposal. "This is not an...

Thousands of tons of materials were seized during a raid in the Chinese province of Guangdong last week. It's the latest enforcement action taken as part of China's ongoing campaign to combat low-quality recovered-material imports. Enforcement officials seized 85,000 tons of primarily scrap plastics and metals with a value of 1 billion RMB (about $146.5 million), according to a June...

Several years of lagging recovered material totals have led leaders of Oregon's e-scrap program to slash weight targets for manufacturers beginning next year. The state's nine-year-old electronics extended producer responsibility program, titled Oregon E-Cycles, sets a weight-based obligation for manufacturers to collect devices each year. The obligation figure has generally risen each year. But product lightweighting for display devices has begun to...

Dell has more than doubled its annual usage of e-plastics collected through its supply chain since beginning the effort two years ago, according to the electronics manufacturer's 2017 corporate responsibility report. The company has also nearly doubled the number of devices it manufactures using recovered e-plastics content compared with a year earlier. Dell's new report, released this week, details the...

The e-scrap export criminal case involving Colorado's Executive Recycling has seen recent developments after being tied up in appeals for the past four years. Brandon Richter, owner and CEO of now-defunct Executive Recycling, was re-sentenced to federal prison June 16, on a reduced sentence as part of a plea agreement. His new 22-month sentence is set to begin next month....

Bankruptcies are a fact of the business world, and the electronics recycling sector is no exception. In the wake of last week's news that PCCR had filed for Chapter 7, we offer a timeline of significant cases that have hit e-scrap of late. Many of these shutterings have come as a result of ongoing industry issues around CRT management and...