Having trouble getting rid of your old TV or CRT monitor? It may be getting more difficult to
dispose of these electronics in the very near future. eForce Compliance, metro-Philadelphia's
largest consumer electronic recycling service provider, will be discontinuing the acceptance of
TVs and CRTs effective April 6, 2013. The move will directly affect the nearly 6,000,000
residents located within their service area. Several other recyclers in Pennsylvania have also
stopped providing recycling services of TVs and CRTs, and a nationwide problem seems to be
looming as evidenced by a recent article in the New York Times.
Free recycling of TVs, computers and computer related items such as keyboards, mice, printers
and screens is the main focus of The Covered Device Recycling Act, enacted in 2012, and is
overseen by the Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania. As part of the Act, a
landfill ban on electronic devices went into effect on January 24, 2013. The Act prohibits
residents and small businesses with fewer than 50 employees from disposing of their electronic
devices in landfills covered under the Act. Manufacturers are held responsible for covering the
costs of managing the recycling of covered devices through contracts with recyclers who
perform collection and processing services, and who also provide a venue for the recycler to
ship back TVs and CRTs to one of the manufacturers’ contracted processors.
“Our collection event services have been in high demand, especially since many county
sponsored events have lines of residents waiting for over an hour, while our wait time averages
less than 5 minutes. The growth of these events has allowed us to hire 20 new employees over
the last 18 months, and we anticipated an equal amount of new hires in 2013,” said Charles
Nygard, co-founder of eForce Compliance, who added, “We will be shifting from job creation
to job subtraction real soon.”
Ironically, eForce was awarded the William M. Heenan Markets Development Award by the
Pennsylvania Recycling Markets in October 2012 for their innovations in the electronic recycling
industry, most notably for their provision of compliant consumer collection events throughout
the Philadelphia region. Now they are faced with the advent of scaling back, or even
eliminating these popular events.
Manufacturers, who bear the responsibility of managing recycling efforts in states that
mandate electronic recycling, typically employ the use of out-of-state organizations to manage
the many diverse state programs nationwide. Unfortunately, certain recyclers are not included
in the recycling plans, regardless of their long-established relationships or status within their
own communities.
“We have contacted every possible resource to obtain a contract and have been told
repeatedly, from the few manufacturers who even return our repeated calls, that our services
are not needed for 2013. The real losers are residents and those employees who will be laid off
because of our exclusion from the program. Our efforts to reach out for assistance to the
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the legislators who wrote the bill, and
other taxpayer-funded agencies, have been fruitless,” said Nygard.
eForce plans to continue to provide their collection events but will no longer accept any TVs or
CRTs effective April 6, 2013.