Attendees chat during the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, Florida. Photo by Big Wave Production / Resource Recycling

Around 950 attendees came to Orlando, Florida, to take in exhibitor booths, sessions on the latest industry trends and laws, and workshops on certification standards at the 2024 E-Scrap Conference – but also to mourn the sudden loss of e-scrap veteran Billy Johnson just before the show. 

The 21st annual E-Scrap Conference, put on by Resource Recycling, brought the e-scrap, ITAD and ITAM industries together to discuss how coming laws might affect them, the best ways to build public trust and industry resilience, compliance and circularity.

Celebrating Billy Johnson’s life

Industry leaders opened the show with a tribute to the Recycled Materials Association’s chief lobbyist, Billy Johnson, who passed away suddenly the Saturday before the show. Johnson, who had worked for ReMA for two decades, was “a tireless advocate for the recycled materials industry, and for the well-being of all of our members,” a ReMA statement said. 

“He was incredibly effective at raising our voice on Capitol Hill and within five Presidential Administrations, ensuring that our industry was known throughout Washington and the interests of all members were protected,” the statement continued. 

Industry leaders also spoke fondly of Johnson during the conference’s opening plenary session. Colleague Cheryl Coleman, ReMA senior vice president of advocacy, safety and sustainability, recalled his kindness, while Craig Boswell of HOBI International emphasized just how much Johnson did for the industry and how his presence was a staple at conferences.

Over his years of work, Johnson secured a special accelerated depreciation allowance for qualified recycling equipment through the Recycled Investment Saves Energy Act, challenged the market dominance of railroads on demurrage and accessorial charges, and achieved an essential business designation for the recycled materials industry from the Department of Homeland Security during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

ReMA’s statement noted that funeral arrangements are still pending, and that it plans to set up a tribute page on its website. 

Reuse and recycling not at odds

During the opening plenary session highlighting current key trends in e-scrap and ITAD, industry experts discussed device repair, design regulations and battery fire dangers.

Walter Alcorn, vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability at the Consumer Technology Association, which represents OEMs, said manufacturers are seeing a continued focus on device repairability. He projected that will translate less into a mass movement of consumers repairing their own devices, and more into more independent repair shops servicing electronics. Manufacturers have begun to open up to this idea much more than in years past, he added.

“That is a rubicon we’ve crossed,” he said, referring to manufacturers’ treating independent repair shops the same as authorized refurbishers. “We’re pretty much there.”

That’s a positive for e-scrap processors, who are dealing with lightweighting in devices contributing to lower volumes of precious metals recovered, and therefore a lower-value e-scrap stream.

“There’s more value in reusable parts components,” Alcorn said. “The resale markets continue to be an important source of revenue.”

ReMA’s Coleman added that despite how it’s sometimes framed, recycling isn’t really at odds with reuse. Even with far greater adoption of refurbishment and reuse, those devices will still ultimately make their way to the recycling stream, she explained. So, it doesn’t take away from commodities recovery in the end.

“Eventually, it’s coming our way,” Coleman said. “Maximize its use.” 

And it’s an environmental win, said Jim Levine, senior vice president of North American operations for major ITAD firm Iron Mountain.

“We all know that repurposing and reuse is a lot more stress-free on the environment than recycling is,” Levine said.

That said, Levine highlighted room for improvement in device design for repair. He advocated for manufacturers to take an approach that embraces modular design allowing for easily removable and replaceable batteries, rather than producing products with a glued-in battery.

Alcorn strongly objected.

“The last thing I would want to see is consumers trying to figure out what battery to put in their smartphone,” Alcorn said. “If you put the wrong battery into the wrong phone, sometimes you get a thermal event, sometimes it doesn’t work.”

That connected to a separate major trend: an industry-wide focus on battery-embedded products. Alcorn said the focus on this problem material is different from the focus on CRTs many years ago – with CRTs, the concern was simply what to do with the material downstream.

“With embedded batteries, it’s fires,” he said.

Coleman said a lot of it comes down to a misunderstanding of what’s in a product and the danger it poses. A lot of people don’t know that the battery in an electric toothbrush – or even something as small as a singing greeting card – can be a fire danger, she noted. And she added that if a battery is described as recyclable, a lot of people are going to put them in their recycling bin – making the message around batteries being recyclable tricky.

So how does the recycling sector hold manufacturers accountable for these devices, which are produced to meet consumer demand?

Alcorn, representing manufacturers, advised caution when regulating.

“In the long run, I do think it’s important for the environmental externalities to be incorporated” into the price of a device, “in one way or another,” Alcorn said. But he advised against banning or restricting items, even ones that are superfluous like singing greeting cards, because of the potential of stymying innovation in more consequential device advancements.

Certification workshops

A pair of sessions dug into the finer points of e-Stewards and R2, two frequently competing, though sometimes collaborating, certification programs that recognize the safe, responsible reuse and recycling of electronic devices. Earning these certifications brings benefits to the recipient both directly and indirectly, their respective representatives said. 

E-scrap and ITAD firms’ customers, for example, more and more insist on such a certification in order to comply with data protection laws where violations can cost tens of millions of dollars. 

“It just makes life easier for multinational companies to work with R2,” said Patty McKenzie, education and outreach director at SERI, the owner and administrator of R2 certification. 

Certification can also help companies stand out in answering RFPs and going about their business, said Daniel Puckett, business director for e-Stewards – if the recipients show off their certification on websites, in pamphlets and in bids for contracts.

“They shout to the whole market, ‘Hey, we know what we’re doing,'” he said of the e-Steward badges.

The two certifications scrutinize similar business aspects, such as material destinations and Basel Convention compliance, but also differ in important ways, the officials said. R2 certifies individual facilities, for example, while e-Stewards applies to companies. 

Powering through reuse 

During the Reuse Power Hour, a key insight was that the cell phone reuse market will continue to experience strong pricing in response to insufficient supply throughout second-half 2024.

Strong demand will be driven by economic uncertainty, growth of 5G adoption, increasing environmental awareness and premium devices retaining high value, said panelist Elizabeth Chen, CEO of Trillion Technologies and Trading.

In addition, the market will see increasing supply of used devices with new product releases including iPhone 16 and Galaxy S24, she said.

However, as phone technology becomes more sophisticated, it can conflict with right-to-repair legislation, she said. Such advances as biometric security features, miniaturization, proprietary parts and tools, and software locks can make repair more difficult and as a result less lucrative. 

Refurbishers recently petitioned the FCC over the detrimental effect of software locks on the secondary mobile phone market.

Software locks make millions of older phones unusable, the letter to the FCC said, because people often do not know they need to unlock the phones before disposal.

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