Cathode ray tubes are heavy, contain hazardous materials, are labor-intensive to process and have had unstable end markets. | Boonchuay1970/Shutterstock
Ten years ago, Indian cathode ray tube manufacturer Videocon was recycling end-of-life CRTs from U.S. processors into new CRT displays. New York-headquartered Nulife Glass was preparing to start up its first CRT glass furnace. In Illinois, Kuusakoski was placing CRT glass in storage cells for future potential recovery. And e-scrap processors around the country were shipping CRTs to Closed Loop Refining and Recovery warehouses in Ohio and Arizona.
A decade later, none of those downstream options remain. As new CRT manufacturing dwindled, Videocon stopped accepting the materials in or around 2018. A year earlier, facing regulatory pressures, Nulife shut down completely just a year after opening its first furnace. Kuusakoski ended its CRT storage project in 2020 and ultimately pulled out of the U.S. altogether this year. And the years-long legal saga of Closed Loop’s landlords targeting suppliers for stockpile cleanup costs is an all-too-familiar cautionary tale to all in the electronics processing industry.
The decline in downstream processors has come alongside what all signs indicate is a significant reduction in CRTs entering the recycling stream. But just how much have volumes declined? And what does the shifting downstream landscape mean for companies that still accept CRTs for some level of processing?
E-Scrap News reviewed state program data and interviewed several processors to get a picture of the current domestic processing situation for CRTs, finding that volumes are down but still very much present in the recycling stream, and that the end of this challenging material stream is not yet upon us.
“I started at URT in 2012,” said Ken Thomas, CEO of the Janesville, Wisconsin-based processor. “And at that point, and every year since, I’ve always been told there’s another five years of CRTs in the market and they’ll all be gone.”
State program data illustrates the drop
The 25 state electronics recycling programs provide a good starting point for analyzing CRT volumes. Each state reports data differently, but several break down the type of e-scrap collected by category, including CRTs.
In Washington state, the E-Cycle state program has seen a 91% drop in CRT glass volumes over the past decade. In 2015, processors participating in the state program reported recovering 19.2 million pounds of CRT glass, already a slight decline from the prior year. By the end of 2024, that volume had dwindled to 1.7 million pounds, according to newly released state program data.
The annual reports show a steady decline over the years, with the largest year-over-year drop coming from 2015 to 2016, when volume decreased by over 5 million pounds.
Additionally, the figures show how CRTs have declined as a percentage of the stream in Washington: In 2015, CRT glass was 46% of all material recovered through the state program; in 2024, it made up just 14%.
By weight, CRT processing peaked in California in 2008, at 219 million pounds recovered. In 2023, that had fallen to 17 million pounds.
In Connecticut, CRT glass recovery volumes have dropped from 11.6 million pounds in 2014 to 1.46 million pounds in 2024.
Connecticut’s annual report in 2017 also hinted at nuances behind the falling numbers. New U.S. CRT display sales fell to virtually nothing in the early 2010s, which was one factor, but in the mid-2010s many private recycling programs also stopped accepting CRTs, according to the report.
So how many CRTs remain in households? Recent insights from Wisconsin suggest there remains a significant volume of displays waiting to enter the end-of-life stream.
E-Cycle Wisconsin conducted a household survey in 2024 asking residents whether they had “tube TVs” in their homes and whether they were in use or unused. The survey data generated an estimate of 558,000 unused CRT TVs in Wisconsin households in 2024, down from 616,000 three years earlier. An additional 291,000 CRT TVs were still in use in households in 2024, down from 345,000 in 2021.
Wisconsin’s state program doesn’t require recycling companies to report the volume of CRTs they handle, but anecdotally, Recycling and Solid Waste Section Manager Sarah Murray relayed that volumes are down quite a bit.
Using average CRT weight figures from the Electronics Recycling Coordination Clearinghouse, E-Cycle Wisconsin estimated the weight of unused CRTs in households to be about 50 million pounds in 2024, down from 55 million in 2021.
Core group of CRT processors remain
As CRTs have declined, some processors have reduced how much they work in the CRT processing space. Connecticut’s 2024 state report highlights some recent job reductions in the state’s e-scrap industry, in part because one company “outsourced the disassembly of all CRT based equipment” and flat panel displays to a company outside of the state.
A handful of core companies are still bringing in, dismantling and processing CRTs in some form. And insights from several of those processors indicate that, although volume is moving downward, CRTs still make up a sizable portion of their inbound stream.
“The fact that there’s a contraction in processing capabilities has kept these CRT tubes from running out,” said Thomas of URT. The company, whose original name was CRT Processing when it was founded in 2003, currently processes the devices at its Janesville, Wisconsin, and Clackamas, Oregon locations.
Figures provided by URT show the company processed 12 million pounds of CRT displays in 2024, compared with 19 million pounds the prior year and 44 million pounds a decade ago. By percentage, that equates to CRT displays making up 17% of what URT handled in 2024, compared with 62% in 2014.
But in an interesting twist, while full display volumes are down, the company in 2024 processed significantly more separated CRT tubes than 10 years ago: 6 million pounds in 2024 versus 2 million pounds in 2014.
That’s because URT 10 years ago was competing with Closed Loop Refining and Recovery, which was charging a lower price to accumulate feedstock, Thomas said. Companies that dismantled CRTs would send the glass tubes to Closed Loop, so URT’s tube volumes fell. As that and other questionable downstream outlets collapsed and spurred liability lawsuits, URT saw its volumes climb back up.
“As the bad actors fell out, people got more and more concerned because they didn’t want to be named” in the resulting lawsuits, Thomas said. “So they started coming back to us, quite frankly.”
Another major processor still heavily involved in CRTs is Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations, which has participated in state programs across the country. Jason Schott, vice president of recycling and recovery at Dynamic, said that at its peak several years ago, CRTs made up 65-70% of what Dynamic was handling. By 2024, CRTs were down to about 20% of the company’s mix, he said.
For Dynamic, the year-over-year decline is exciting because it opens the door to new opportunities, Schott said.
“We’re able to start putting more focus as an industry around technology and advancement, innovation, to start supporting the broader span of materials,” he said. That ability has been “a little bit limited in the past, because we’ve had to put so much focus around management of CRTs.”
Additionally, CRT processing — and electronics processing in general — has gotten significantly more expensive over the past several years, Schott said. CRTs require a labor-intensive manual disassembly process, and there are not a lot of technological advancements coming onto the market to handle CRTs. It’s “definitely kind of refreshing” to see the decrease, Schott said. Still, he isn’t banking on the end of CRTs coming any time soon.
“We’re kind of expecting that this will probably always be in the material stream,” he said, with CRTs coming out of closets and the back of garages until “the end of time.”
“It’s really just when will it hit those kinds of negligible volumes, which we don’t know,” he said. “But it could be in the next three to five years, like they’ve always said.”
End markets dominated by tile application
URT’s process involves manually dismantling the CRT devices, then putting the glass components through hammer mills to grind it up and prepare it into a vitrified compound that is used in tile manufacturing. For ceramic producers, the lead, silica and cadmium contained within the CRT glass are actually desirable substances for the tile production process. URT sells the tile feedstock material to buyers in South America and Asia, Thomas said.
Dynamic dismantles the CRTs into their various components, including plastic, circuit boards and ferrous and non-ferrous metals, then separates the glass tube into its panel glass and funnel glass components. Each glass component goes to separate end markets, which Schott declined to identify.
Illinois-headquartered Com2 Recycling Solutions also remains a significant downstream outlet for U.S. CRTs, and the company recently told E-Scrap News its 2024 volume was down roughly 60% from just two years prior. The company has historically used CRT glass also to create a frit product for use in ceramic tile production. To offset the decline in CRT glass coming through its doors, Com2 has begun incorporating crushed solar panel glass into the frit mixture.
CRT glass end markets have been notoriously unstable over the years. Besides those already mentioned, other end markets that have disappeared over the years include Spain-headquartered Camacho Recycling, which stopped accepting CRT glass in 2018; Glencore’s New Brunswick-based smelter that shut down completely in 2019; and Mexico-based Technologies Displays Mexicana, TDM, which stopped accepting glass in 2022.
Two North American smelters appear to still handle some small volume of CRT glass.
In an email, Gregory Thies, general manager of Doe Run’s Buick Resource Recycling Facility in Boss, Missouri, confirmed that the smelter “continues to process CRT glass in order to recover lead,” and he added that, “at this time, Doe Run plans to continue to recycle CRT glass.”
Canadian smelting giant Teck indicated in its 2024 sustainability report that the company’s Trail, British Columbia, facility retains a focus on “treating cathode ray tube glass” alongside various types of batteries. However, the report shows a substantial drop in recycled material processed at the Trail facility last year, falling from 37,654 metric tons in 2023 down to 3,210 metric tons in 2024. E-Scrap News contacted Teck to confirm current CRT activities but didn’t hear back.
Case Study: Washington report highlights how end markets have shifted over time
Washington’s E-Cycle annual report, prepared by the producer responsibility organization Washington Materials Management & Financing Authority, provides significant detail and transparency in material movement and processing techniques.
The report requires each participating processor to publicly detail how the company processes each material type, the type of end market they use and the country in which the downstream processing takes place. It illustrates how end markets have shifted from new CRT display production to lead smelters, then to the current concentration in tile production.
Back in 2015, there were seven processors participating in the state program, and they reported the following disposition methods and locations:
- Ace Metal: Sent CRT glass for glass-to-glass recycling in Mexico and India.
- EWC Group: Sent CRT glass for glass-to-glass recycling in Mexico and India.
- IMS: Sent CRT glass for glass-to-glass or glass-to-commodity processing, within the U.S.
- E-Waste LLC: Sent CRT glass for glass-to-glass recycling in Mexico for use in new CRT production.
- ECS: CRT glass shipped either to glass-to-glass recycling for use in new CRTs in Mexico and India, or shipped to a lead smelter in the U.S. or Canada.
- ERI: CRT glass sent for glass-to-glass recycling into new CRTs in Mexico and India.
- Total Reclaim: Glass-to-glass, smelter or tile manufacturing.
In 2024, eight processors participating in the program reported the following disposition methods:
- Ace Metal: “The glass is processed by shredding. Then they treat the leaded glass and make an end product of glass frit.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- E-Waste: “Product manufacturing for production of ceramic tiles.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- ERI: “Glass to glass; all materials reused in new glass products or tiles.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- EWC: “Glass to glass; all materials reused in new glass products or tiles.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- Metro Metals: “Smelter. Byproducts used as cement or tile additive.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- Total Reclaim: “Smelter. Byproducts used as cement or tile additive.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
- URT: “Tile and lead recovered.” Processing takes place in the U.S.
This story has been updated with comment from Doe Run, confirming that the company continues to process CRTs at its Buick Resource Recycling Facility.