Washington's e-scrap collection numbers are down again. In the first six months of 2016, the state program took in less than 90 percent of the weight collected during the same period a year ago. The E-Cycle Washington program collected 21.66 million pounds of computers, monitors and TVs during the first half of the year. That is 87.3 percent of the...

It has been six months since Call2Recycle launched the nation's first extended producer responsibility program for single-use batteries in Vermont, and Carl Smith, CEO and president of Call2Recycle, is pleased with how it's going. The recycling rate of single-use batteries "went from zero to 10 percent in the first six months," said Smith.That uptick has equated to the recovery of...

The Centralized Study on Availability of Recycling started as a report to examine recycling acceptance rates for certain types of packaging. That narrow focus morphed into a comprehensive study regarding the larger issue of recycling accessibility in America. The report, conducted by The Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), includes data from 2,000 communities, both big and small, urban and rural. According...

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is seeking participants for a recycling survey that will quantify the amount of plastics recycling happening in the Lone Star State. The research will also measure the economic impacts of materials recovery in the state and aims to identify ways to increase recycling, funding and infrastructure. In 2015, the Texas Recycling Data Initiative was...

North America's two largest garbage and recycling companies say recovered materials values increased during the second quarter, giving them revenue boosts. Waste Management and Republic Services each reported slight bumps in commodities sales revenues. Waste Connections, on the other hand, experienced a decrease, attributing the drop to low recovered plastics prices. "This is the first revenue increase resulting from commodity...

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is seeking participants for a recycling survey that will quantify the amount of recycling happening in the Lone Star State. The research will also measure the economic impacts of materials recovery in the state and aims to identify ways to increase recycling, funding and infrastructure. In 2015, the Texas Recycling Data Initiative was released,...

While kids and teachers across the country are getting ready to go back to school, nonprofit organization Keep America Beautiful is launching its sixth-annual Recycle-Bowl. Recycle-Bowl is a K-12 school-based recycling competition open to schools, teachers, administrators and even parent organizations. The goal is to engage and educate communities about recycling. Last year, nearly 700,000 students and teachers from more...

Colt Refining and Recycling says it will be expanding to North Carolina after the purchase of assets and land formerly owned by e-scrap company Zloop. New Hampshire-based Colt recently bought the assets at auction for more than $2 million.At the time of the auction, it was unclear what Colt would do with the Zloop machinery and building. But the company...

The second quarter was sluggish for worldwide shipments of new mobile devices. Globally, 38.7 million tablets shipped in the second quarter of 2016, according to theInternational Data Corporation (IDC). That is down 12.3 percent year-over-year as consumers hold on to their old tablets just a little bit longer, a move that also keeps the devices out of the recycling chain.Even...

The second of quarter of 2016 bought $40 million worth of good news to Outerwall, the parent company of ecoATM and Gazelle. Outerwall operates electronics trade-in businesses ecoATM and Gazelle as well as Redbox and other self-serve kiosk businesses.The publicly traded company, which was recently bought by private-equity interests, announced second-quarter profits of $40.5 million, despite some past struggles with...