By creatively utilizing existing collection infrastructure, a county government in Maryland is rolling out curbside electronics and battery collection for all electronics at no additional cost.
Like virtually every municipal recycling program in the country, unincorporated Montgomery County has seen a rise in fires in the waste stream in recent years, sometimes attributed to improperly discarded electronics and batteries. During a news conference last fall, a Montgomery County Fire and Rescue battalion chief said the county experienced 18 battery-related fires in the waste and recycling system throughout the year, ranging from a laptop or smartphone going into thermal runaway to an actual structure fire.
A few years ago, the county decided one way to tackle that rising problem was to make it easier to recycle electronics, said Alan Pultyniewicz, who leads recycling and refuse services for the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection’s recycling and resource management division, in an interview with E-Scrap News.
The county this month announced that by the end of 2025 every unincorporated county resident will have access to the device collection program.
Convenience and hazard reduction at once
The county covers about 500 square miles with a population of over 1 million residents, and it includes multiple municipalities such as Rockville and Tacoma Park. The county government contracts with a private hauler to provide weekly curbside recycling collection to about 223,000 single-family households outside of those municipalities.
The Montgomery County Shady Grove transfer station is centrally located in the county and allows residents to drop off all manner of recyclables, including used devices. There, devices are aggregated and then sent to a downstream e-scrap processor. But residents who live in the peripheral parts of the county didn’t have easy access to the drop-off option, and retailers that accept devices in the county have certain limits on what devices they’ll take or might charge a fee.
Additionally, for residents with a disability or who simply don’t have the means or time to make a dedicated trip to the transfer station, the drop-off option wasn’t the most convenient.
“This is really how it got started, was trying to find the best ways to reduce the risk of fires, and then also provide a service that makes it easier for residents to recycle,” Pultyniewicz said.
Scrap metal service provides base for device collection
Besides the typical curbside recyclables like paper, plastic and aluminum cans, the county provides a special on-demand curbside scrap metal collection service. Residents can call and schedule collection of scrap metal, appliances, old bicycles and yard equipment, and the county will send out a scrap metal collection truck that week.
That service was key to establishing the curbside e-scrap service.
“We realized there was room available on the scrap metal routes; the trucks were not being filled up because not everyone is participating on a weekly basis in scrap metal,” Pultyniewicz said.
“We wouldn’t be adding additional trucks, we wouldn’t be adding additional staffing resources,” he added. “That made a huge difference.”
Because the trucks are only carrying scrap metal, they’re not loaded down with flammable recyclables like paper, making it a good fit for adding in battery-containing electronics. Collecting batteries together with a non-flammable stream has been a strategy in other communities that have rolled out this type of program, including in Portland, Oregon, where batteries are collected using glass-collection trucks.
Montgomery County is still asking residents to tape the terminals of batteries and put them in some sort of container labeled “batteries,” although it doesn’t require residents to separate batteries by chemistry.
Beginning in 2022, the county started amending its 13 total collection contracts when they came up for renewal, adding electronics and batteries to the list of materials the contractor would be required to collect on-demand at the curb. So far, six collection districts have added e-scrap and batteries, and the final seven collection contracts are renewing this year with the new material streams.
Clearing out a backlog
Residents can use the service to recycle almost anything that could be considered an electronic device, including CRT displays, computers, peripherals, smart devices, small household appliances and much more.
For the six collection districts that have been active since 2022, the county has received over 2,500 requests for e-scrap or battery collections, Pultyniewicz said, and that’s without a broad messaging campaign, which the county has avoided until the service is available to all.
“We would definitely see that first four to six weeks, people cleaning out their attics, basements, kitchen drawers, of these items,” he said. After the six-week mark, the county sees the numbers drop down a bit to a couple of service requests per week in a district.
“Each area we’ve rolled it out, it’s all been the same pattern,” he said.
Pultyniewicz noted the county bids out the collected materials monthly, and the downstream e-scrap processor can change from month to month.
A version of this story appeared in E-Scrap News on Apr. 23.
