Plastic products sold in California with "biodegradable" and "compostable" printed on their labels cost Walmart nearly $1 million in a settlement earlier this month. County district attorneys say the world's largest retailer ran afoul of a California law that bans products labeled "biodegradable" and requires those using the word "compostable" to meet ASTM compostability standards. Walmart is not the first...

Colleges and universities have begun a fierce competition to determine which campus can recycle the most. For eight weeks, schools of all sizes will participate in RecycleMania, which launched on Feb. 5. The competition has categories for the weight of recyclable materials and food scraps, as well as overall waste reduction achieved by each campus. Managed by nonprofit environmental organization...

Athletes at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo will be awarded with medals made from recycled e-scrap metals. Starting Feb. 1, Japan began asking the country's citizens to donate their old electronics devices for the initiative. The goal is to collect 88 pounds of gold, 10,800 pounds of silver and 6,500 pounds of bronze. That would allow production of...

A lawsuit alleging an e-scrap processor resold thousands of Microsoft Office key cards on the black market has been settled out of court. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Microsoft filed suit against Global Electronic Recycling (GER) in September 2015, claiming the Phoenix company violated the terms of a 2009 contract. Microsoft alleged GER failed to destroy more than...

Two familiar pieces of legislation under consideration in Illinois aim to promote CRT glass storage, but they take different paths toward that goal. The idea of storing CRT glass in dedicated cells at a landfill was first proposed by Illinois-based company Kuusakoski US several years ago. The company began placing the material in storage cells in 2015 at a landfill owned...

CarbonLite, a reclaimer producing food-grade recycled PET, will double its processing capacity this year with the construction of a $62 million facility in Dallas. The company already operates a major PET bottle recycling facility in the Los Angeles area. The largest buyers of its recycled PET pellets are Nestlé Waters North America and PepsiCo, which use them in new drink...

An effort in Austin to collect clothes at the curb aims to bolster convenience for residents, but nonprofit groups say it does so at the expense of established social programs. The city launched curbside textiles collection on Dec. 5, contracting with Ohio-based Simple Recycling for collection and processing of clothing and other textiles. Austin, a city of nearly 890,000 residents,...

Baltimore's public works department failed to hit materials recovery targets for two straight years, a city audit recently found, but the department says the measurement metrics should be revised. The city's Board of Estimates set recycling goals for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 at 32,000 tons and 34,000 tons collected, respectively. An audit of those two years found that neither...

E-scrap facilities with R2 certification will face stricter audits beginning this year as auditors shift their focus to outcome rather than policy. Certification to the R2 standard indicates a facility has met certain environmental and worker health and safety standards. Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI) administers the standard and provides auditor training. Employees working for separate certification bodies (CBs) conduct audits,...

The world's two largest smartphone brands, Samsung and Apple, shipped fewer devices in 2016 than one year earlier. But, according to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), overall smartphone shipments rose over the previous year, thanks to substantial increases from Chinese manufacturers. Overall, 2016 saw about 1.47 billion smartphones shipped worldwide, IDC reported, which was about 33 million more...