Dead relatives are easier to deal with than dead electronics.

We know where to bury an uncle, but how many of us know where and how to properly bury a broken TV? Or a laptop or cellphone? Even that Betamax VCR?

“It’s very true,” said Jim Shaw, who as Lucas County sanitary engineer oversees the Lucas County solid waste management district. “[Residents] don’t know how to handle it.”

For example, we’ve all seen that old tube TV the size of a small car that sits on a neighborhood street curb until it takes root in the ground. The TV’s owner is expecting a Lucas County waste truck to haul the set away. He might as well be waiting for Godot.

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Recycling do's and don't's

In most cases “our waste haulers are not picking that up,” Mr. Shaw said. “There’s always something you can do with it. It’s just educating the public” as to what that is.

Recycling policies for those things that plug into walls or run on batteries can vary from municipality to municipality. A good starting point, though, is the electronics recycling guide Lucas Country provides for residents on its website. It’s a list of area organizations and businesses that accept most if not all all discarded electronics — aka e-waste — including broken or outdated TVs, computers and computer monitors, phones, stereos, microwaves, DVD players, video game consoles, appliances, radios, and much more.

At the top of the website’s alphabetized list of e-waste recyclers is AccuShred. The data destruction company, located at 1114 W. Central Ave., has been in business for 15 years and does not discriminate between e-waste it will recycle or not.

“If it has a cord, we can recycle it,” said Nate Segall, company president.

AccuShred’s recycling service is free — even for walk-in customers — with the exception of TVs and computer monitors. AccuShred charges a minimum of $35 per set, and its fee increases based on a television’s size; monitors are a flat $10. The company also destroys any and all hard drives in computers turned in for recycling, a service that costs $5 per hard drive. (See sidebar for more information about safeguarding your information when recycling a computer or smartphone.)

AccuShred has partnered with the city of Sylvania for nearly a decade on a free and popular community shred and recycle event. The company also has an annual West Toledo recycling drive in the former Sears parking lot of the Westgate Village Shopping Center.

And with the June closure of The Andersons in West Toledo, ending the store’s similar shred and recycle parking lot event, Mr. Segall said AccuShred’s recycling dates in 2017 were circled on even more calendars.

“Last year was over the top,” he said. “It was a good deal of electronics.”

Similarly, community participation in the Toledo Zoo’s annual shred and recycle event, done in partnership with Keep Toledo/Lucas County Beautiful, has notably increased since the event’s inception in 2009 as one of several Earth-friendly activities during the zoo’s Party for the Planet.

“Thousands of guests participate,” said Shayla Bell Moriarty, Toledo Zoo’s director of communications. “We will hear from a lot of our guests that they’re gathering and moving all those items so that they don’t throw them out. They look forward to the Party for the Planet and to get rid of those items.”

A big problem

In 2009, 200 million pounds of consumer electronics were recycled, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade organization and lobbying group for the industry. A year later, and the industry recycled 300 million pounds of e-waste.

In 2011, the CTA announced its 2016 goal of recycling 1 billion pounds of consumer electronics annually. But in 2016, only 630 million pounds of electronics were recycled after reaching a high point of 700 million pounds the year before.

The decline wasn’t because consumers were recycling less of their e-waste, the CTA announced in a press release. Instead, “as electronics become smaller, lighter, and thinner, fewer materials are required to create them.”

Best Buy, which has more than 1,500 stores throughout North America, including three in Lucas County, has a similarly lofty goal for the total amount of e-waste it will recycle through its in-store recycling program by 2020: 2 billion pounds. The consumer electronics retail giant is likely to hit that mark. Through its program, Best Buy has already recycled 1.5 billion pounds of e-waste and averages 409 pounds in electronics collections every minute stores are open.

Best Buy’s national program was prompted by much smaller e-waste recycling drives hosted independently years ago by various Best Buy stores in their parking lots. The community recycling efforts grew in popularity and, nearly a decade ago, were officially adopted by Best Buy as a chain-wide recycling initiative. On its website, Best Buy proudly notes that it is “the nation’s largest retail recycler of used electronics and appliances.”

“We realized this is an opportunity and customer need,” said Dan Johnson, Best Buy’s director of recommerce. “They wanted to get rid of their stuff, and local stores took it upon themselves to do these parking lot events.”

Through this initiative — dependent on state regulations and laws regarding recycling — most Best Buy locations across the country accept the majority of consumer electronics to be recycled for free. This includes computers and tablets, cellphones and radios, cameras, video games, DVDs, and CDs. And for $25, Best Buy will also accept in-store drop-offs of a tube TV or monitor smaller than 32 inches or a flat-panel set (LCD, plasma, LED) smaller than 50 inches.

Best Buy will only accept a larger TV or major household appliance such as a refrigerator or washing machine as part of its delivery service (for an additional fee of $14.99) or as a standalone pick-up (a $99.99 charge per item). For more details, including information on Best Buy’s trade-in program for those not-quite-so-old electronics, visit bestbuy.com.

Risky business

Best Buy charges for recycling TVs because it is typically a more lengthy and expensive process for the chain’s contracted recyclers. Besides being our largest consumer electronics by size and often by weight, TVs, especially the older sets, have more dangerous materials such as lead and mercury in their innards and more components to break down, including plastic, metal, and glass parts.

Jeff Norden, an owner of AIM Ecycling, said his Toledo company accepts almost all e-waste from residents as a goodwill gesture to the community. His goal: “To be nice and break even.” But AIM Ecycling will not accept that curbside tube TV or dead plasma set.

Not only is the cost involved in that recycling process too great, Mr. Norden said, so is the potential legal peril if a vendor does not dispose of the sets properly, as happened recently in Columbus.

In August, Closed Loop Refining and Recovery, which recycled the old CRT TVs through facilities in Columbus and Arizona, was ordered by a Franklin County Court judge to pay more than $18 million for breaking its lease at the company’s Columbus headquarters and abandoning more than 100 million pounds of CRT glass.

“It’s just not worth the risk of being named in a lawsuit,” Mr. Norden said.

Best Buy’s recycling service is also popular locally, especially during the spring cleaning season, said Chad Chanavare, general manager of the Best Buy at 4505 Monroe St.

“We can fill up a semi-trailer truck full of recycling,” he said. “People are confused with what to do with [e-waste]. They don’t want to put it on the curb and have it go to a landfill.”

And neither does Jim Puckett, the founder of Seattle-based Basel Action Network, who says recyclers such as Best Buy, despite their best intentions, are still not doing enough.

Mr. Puckett was part of an industry watchdog’s efforts several years ago to track e-waste as it worked its way through the pipeline of recyclers throughout the United States, was shipped overseas for other recyclers to strip off anything of value, and reached its final destination: a toxic Chinese landfill.

In 2013, 60 Minutes followed that landfill investigation with a 2013 story exposing this shady but legal practice.

The fallout led the Environmental Protection Agency and the consumer electronics industry to ratify the standard known as R2 — meaning Responsible Recycling — with more stringent requirements for e-waste recycling companies and groups to become R2 compliant or even maintain their R2 certification.

Not far enough?

Mr. Puckett said even the increased standards don’t go far enough to prevent landfill hazards and should prohibit recyclers from shipping e-waste overseas.

“American recyclers still have to be very worried about recyclers in the U.S., not just waste brokers,” he said.

To prevent the export of e-waste, Basel Action Network and other groups concerned that R2’s recycling standards weren’t strict enough created the e-Stewards certification.

Among the requirements of e-Stewards-certified recyclers: Anything that is hazardous to another country cannot be exported.

Recycling e-waste through e-Stewards, however, isn’t easy or convenient for Lucas County residents.

The closest e-Stewards location is the Staples in Bowling Green, 1135 S. Main St. Suite 215. Comparatively, Lucas County lists 10 businesses that accept e-waste, although not all of them are even R2 certified. (AIM Ecycling is R2 certified.)

But sometimes, better is preferable to best, particularly when the third option is to do nothing at all.

“I think we need to accept the fact that one size is not necessarily going to fit all,” said Nick Hennessy, manager of sustainability at Bowling Green State University. “There are those things that we ideally want to do but are not able to do for financial reasons or other constraints. Let’s at least go for this effort” of R2 recycling rather than eschewing the e-waste cause completely.

In fact, BGSU has a contract with AIM Ecycling to handle its e-waste. For the university’s 2017 fiscal year, AIM picked up nearly 38 tons of e-waste.

As Lucas County sanitary engineer, Mr. Shaw applauds the progress by the consumer electronics industry in recycling e-waste.

“When you look back about 20 years ago, when all of this started, and as soon as 10 years ago, e-waste was really a huge problem,” he said. “But there’s been a global effort to address it.”

He added, “It seems like it’s getting better and better each year.”

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

First Published March 17, 2018, 11:56 p.m.