Sandwiched between a quiet residential neighborhood and a tree-lined multi-use trail, a 10-year-old cathode ray tube and assorted e-scrap stockpile in West Bend, Wisconsin, is finally being removed and disposed of at an estimated cost of $3.2 million.
It’s the final cleanup in the long-running saga of 5R Processors, a one-time e-scrap collector that failed in spectacular fashion, leading to rare prison sentences for the former executives and millions of dollars in public funds going to clean up the messes.
The location is a 105,000-square-foot warehouse on a 7-acre parcel of land in West Bend, a town of 30,000 residents about 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee. It’s one of six locations 5R formerly operated in Wisconsin; the company had one additional site in Tennessee.
The city recently took ownership of the property through receivership proceedings and began orchestrating the cleanup. Hazardous waste management firm Veolia, which holds a hazardous waste disposal contract with the state of Wisconsin through 2027, was selected to perform the cleanup and was on-site as of early December.
Veolia quoted the city a $3.2 million price tag for the West Bend cleanup, city officials told E-Scrap News, making it the largest bill yet for the Wisconsin cleanups. As of mid-2024, the other five 5R sites together totaled about $2.2 million, according to a state report. Meanwhile, a 5R site in Tennessee was cleaned up by the property’s landlord at a cost of $1.1 million in 2019.
‘A huge mess’
5R Processors was founded in Wisconsin in 1988, and for many years the company was a functional electronics recycling operation. It processed a variety of electronics, including CRT computer monitors and televisions, disassembling the devices and separating leaded funnel glass from non-lead-bearing glass. The resulting streams were sold to vendors.
From 2011 until the company’s collapse in 2016, the company began to store CRT glass in violation of federal regulations, which prohibit speculative accumulation of CRT glass, prosecutors said in 2020. By 2016, the company had amassed 9.9 million pounds of crushed CRT glass, broken and intact CRTs, whole TVs and other assorted e-scrap across its seven locations.
5R acquired the West Bend site in October 2014, and the company received a conditional use permit to operate a recycling center at the location in early 2015, according to the city. But as quickly as it started up, the facility stopped operating amid the wider 5R company strife. The company stopped paying taxes on the property in 2015.
The company did a lot of work during that short time.
“It’s amazing to see how much accumulated in a year,” said Jess Wildes, assistant city administrator for West Bend, in an interview with E-Scrap News. “It’s just a huge mess.”
Last year, the building’s roof caved in. The facility was a frequent target for break-ins and vandalism. Even by 5R standards, the facility was in bad shape, city officials learned when Veolia came out to do a quote for the cleanup.
“When they went through to create the estimate for us, they described it as looking like a bomb went off in the building,” said Jay Shambeau, West Bend city administrator.
Three former company executives ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to store and transport hazardous waste without required permits and manifests, and two served time in prison. A fourth former executive pleaded guilty to a tax charge and also served prison time. 
Receivership opens door for public funding
In 2021, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources estimated the West Bend warehouse had 841,000 pounds of hazardous waste on site, including 393,000 pounds of CRT-containing devices; 146,000 pounds of miscellaneous e-scrap; 110,000 pounds of material “assumed to be CRTs” in gaylords; 46,000 pounds of bare CRT tubes, some broken; 45,000 pounds of crushed CRT glass; 27,000 pounds of “processed” CRT glass; 13,800 pounds of flat panels; 1,000 pounds of small fluorescent tubes; and 27 large projection TVs.
City officials last week told E-Scrap News they don’t yet have a final figure for how much material is being removed, as the work is still in progress. The e-scrap cleanup began right as the U.S. EPA finished removing friable asbestos from the facility. That work began on Oct. 28 and was estimated to take about six weeks.
Much of the e-scrap cleanup bill will come out of public funds. Although former company owners were ordered to pay restitution intended to cover the full cost of all site cleanups, only a limited amount has been collected. As of 2023, one former executive had paid $100,000 and another was making monthly payments of $127 towards a total $1.9 million restitution figure.
With those funding constraints, state lawmakers in 2022 approved a bill making $2.5 million in state funds available to pay for the 5R cleanups. By mid-2023, it was clear that wouldn’t be enough to cover the West Bend site, and lawmakers allocated another $2 million. One condition of the funding is that the property must be publicly owned, so the recently concluded receivership process for the West Bend site made the project eligible.
Wildes, the West Bend assistant city administrator, submitted testimony in support of the 2022 state funding legislation, describing a longtime nuisance property that had generated 272 police calls over a five-year period.
