We all have unused items sitting in closets, drawers, or forgotten bins in attics, garages, or basements. Old laptops, e-readers, or tablets that no longer charge. Cellphones that bricked after an update. Power cords, peripherals, and charging cables also need to be recycled in my state.
I know I have boxes full of charging cables that no longer work. I also have gadgets stored in boxes waiting to be taken to our local recycling center, but early weekday closing hours and limited Saturday hours make it hard to get there when it’s open. Nearly 8 million tons of e-waste are discarded each year in the U.S. I realize that some devices I review or buy for myself can become a problem.
Have you ever stopped to think about what happens to these gadgets and cables when you recycle them? Take a closer look at what happens and why it’s so important to recycle responsibly.
First Stage: Collection and Sorting
E-recycling starts with collection. Whether you bring it to a retailer, mail it back to the producer, or drop it off at a recycling facility, the devices must leave your hands and begin the recycling process.
What happens next depends on the facility. Some embrace AI and robotics for faster processing. In this case, gadgets and other tech items are placed on conveyors where AI-powered sorting takes place. Workers may help too. The goal is to identify what still has value and what doesn’t.
Items are disassembled to separate valuable parts from broken components. It’s also important to properly dispose of lithium-ion batteries.
If something can be refurbished and sold to a consumer, it’s better than destroying something that still has years of remaining life. With rare earth minerals and other mined ores impacting the environment, reusing devices or recovering materials from them (urban mining) is essential.
Second Stage: Shredding and Separation
Gadgets and other electronic components that reach this phase are fed into specialized shredders that chop them into small fragments. They work like cross-cutting paper shredders, but the blades can cut through hard plastic and metal.
Shredded pieces move down conveyors to remove the metals. Magnets can pull out iron and steel components, while eddy currents repel non-ferrous metals like aluminum and copper. The separated metals can be melted down at a facility and sent to manufacturers for production materials.
If glass screens were not removed in the first phase, they can be sorted in the water tanks. Plastic components float, while glass sinks.
Optical sorting lasers help separate the different types of plastic found in a device. Depending on the number, they’re sorted together so that only ABS (enclosures and housing components) is in one container, while PC (See-through parts) goes to another container. Plastics aren’t interchangeable, so the material’s purity is important when melting them into pellets for reuse.
Third Stage: Recovery (Urban Mining)
Items like lithium-ion batteries cannot be recycled using traditional methods. If you crush or puncture a lithium-ion battery, there’s a fire risk. Recyclers have specialized training and are equipped with thermal sensors and water- or chemical-based suppression systems to prevent fires.
They also use specialized equipment to control the environment during battery recycling. One of the problems with lithium-ion batteries is that they can short-circuit and heat up (thermal runaway). When that happens, the battery may smoke or start a fire. If the battery explodes, it may send shrapnel flying. To prevent this, oxygen supplies are kept to a minimum, and heat is carefully regulated.
The materials in these batteries can be recovered through hydrometallurgy or pyrometallurgy. Pyrometallurgy uses heat-based processes such as smelting to break down materials. Heats of more than 1000ºC are used, so it requires a lot of energy, and the process produces emissions that must be filtered to prevent air pollution.
Hydrometallurgy uses chemicals, making it more energy-efficient. However, it produces hazardous wastewater that must be carefully treated before being released into the environment or public water supplies.
One of the results of these recycling processes is known as “Black Mass.” This is a dark powdery mixture containing cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese, and nickel. The material is becoming integral to a circular economy by being reused to make EV batteries.
The Value in Preparation Before Recycling
You’ve deleted your files and photos. That’s good, right? It’s a common mistake people make. Restoring to a factory reset is better.
When you delete a file, you don’t actually erase the data. Instead, you’re removing the link to that information. The photos, tax records, medical reports, bills, and other private documents still exist somewhere. If someone has the skill, they can restore the link and access all of your data.
Bitdefender points out the importance of data destruction. In 2019, a data recovery team purchased more than 150 hard drives on eBay. Of those drives, 42% contained sensitive data that the team recovered. The data included:
- Office emails from a popular travel company.
- School and university documents, including student names, class papers, email addresses, and photos.
- Shipping documents and truck registrations from a freight company.
- A software developer’s family passports, CVs, financial records, and birth certificates.
About 15% of these hard drives had gone through data sanitization before the items were shipped. That underscores the importance of choosing companies that properly destroy data.
Before you hand your devices over to a company, do your research. Ask where the recycling facility sends its tech for recycling. If they don’t know, don’t risk it. At the bare minimum, you want to know that their ITAD vendor is R2, NAID AAA, and e-Steward certified.
For devices with an HDD, use data wiping software such as DBAN. It erases the hard drive by repeatedly overwriting it with random binary data until the information becomes unrecoverable.
If you’re desperate, take out the hard drive from your laptop or computer and destroy it with a sledgehammer. Since it will eventually be shredded anyway, destroying it guarantees that no one can access your data.
Lithium-ion batteries are a fire risk and require special handling. Never throw them in the trash. Instead, ask which state of charge the recycling facility or manufacturer prefers. A general rule of thumb is that they should be around 30% if they’re being shipped by air. Hand-deliver it to the facility, or follow the manufacturer’s instructions for shipping rechargeable tech.
Recycle Nation includes the contact information for companies offering electronics recycling in your area. Enter your ZIP code to get a list of local recyclers.
If you don’t see anyone nearby, consider using a mail-back service like ERI or recycling with retailers like Best Buy or Staples, which use trusted vendors. Best Buy offers home pickup for two large appliances or TVs, plus unlimited smaller tech items and cables. Haul Away & Recycle is a convenient service for clearing your house of old gadgets.
