This story has been updated and corrected.
The owner of a defunct Orange County, Calif. company must pay more than $150,000 in restitution after investigators found he defrauded the state’s electronics recycling program.
Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Recycle Your City falsely inflated the count of devices it handled, and it falsified names and addresses of customers who supposedly dropped off the end-of-life devices, according to a release from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle).
The fraud investigation began in 2014 and, according to the release, Recycle Your City owner Glen Davis in 2017 pleaded guilty to attempting “to file false/forged instrument and grand theft.” He was ordered to complete community service as part of a probation sentence and to pay restitution of nearly $155,000. CalRecycle announced the resolution of the case this month.
The company is now closed, according to CalRecycle. State records show Recycle Your City had its e-scrap collector approval revoked in March 2014. It was one of more than 1,300 organizations that have collected e-scrap through the California recycling program since the program launched in 2005.
According to CalRecycle, the fraud occurred before Recycle Your City was first approved to participate in the state program. At the time, the Recycle Your City collected devices and transferred them to a company that was an approved collector in the Covered Electronic Waste Recycling Program. The devices were later claimed for payment by a recycler. CalRecycle stated Recycle Your City provided false names and address on its source documentation, which made the electronics it handed over ineligible for payments from the state.
Davis has until January 28, 2022 to contest the amount of the restitution, according to CalRecycle.
The case underscores that “companies who try to take advantage of the program will find out that there are real consequences for their actions,” CalRecycle Director Scott Smithline said in the release.
Recycle Your City’s Yelp page indicates it opened in 2007. The company claims it collected about 1 million pounds of e-scrap per month.
This story has been updated with additional information from CalRecycle and, based on that information, corrected to make clear the nature of the fraud and the reason for the restitution order.
