Making CRT Recycling Work

Despite their lead content, cathode-ray tubes—or CRTs—are gaining recycling ground, though state and federal regulations could help or hinder this growing business.

By Lynn R. Novelli

Kent Kiser is managing editor of Scrap.

Depending on whom you ask, cathode-ray tubes—or CRTs— represent either recycling’s greatest opportunity or its greatest challenge for the 21st century.
   CRTs are the video display components in televisions and computer monitors. A CRT is essentially a vacuum tube made of specialized glass that contains a cathode-ray electron gun. Physically, a CRT consists of the glass panel or face plate that forms the screen, which is connected to the glass funnel. The panel and funnel are sealed together with a low-temperature glass frit, a solder glass that contains organic binders. At the rear of the funnel is the glass neck, which houses the electron gun that creates the image on the screen.
   Bob Glavin, president and CEO of electronics recycler United Recycling Industries Inc. (West Chicago, Ill.), is one who sees great opportunity in recycling CRTs. “It will continue to grow,” he asserts. “The numbers are going to go through the roof.” 
   He’s right about the numbers, at least in terms of the number of CRTs available for recycling. According to U.S. EPA, some 57 million new computers and televisions are sold annually in the United States, while 20 million to 24 million outdated units are stored each year. Virtually every one of those units contains a CRT, making them potential recyclable resources.
  What makes those numbers look more like a challenge than an opportunity, however, is that color CRTs can contain 2 to 8 pounds of lead. Most of the lead is in the funnel and frit, where it’s intended to shield the user from radiation. There’s enough lead in a CRT, in fact, to classify it under certain conditions as a hazardous waste under EPA regulations. A 1999 University of Florida study found that under those conditions the average concentration of lead in leachate from CRT glass was 22.2 mg/l—four times the EPA’s toxicity characteristic regulatory level of 5 mg/l that’s used to classify lead-containing materials as toxic.
   Under current EPA rules, CRTs that come from households can be disposed of in a nonhazardous waste sanitary landfill—unless the state specifically bans such disposal. Massachusetts and California are just two states that have already imposed such bans.
   In the same vein, nearly two dozen other states have introduced legislation regarding CRT disposal and recycling, suggesting that “the number of states with laws against landfilling CRTs from households will be growing,” says John Hayworth, ISRI’s director of environmental compliance.
   CRTs that come from all sources other than households must be either recycled or disposed of in a hazardous waste landfill. Any entity that collects such CRTs—including municipalities, waste haulers, and recyclers—must therefore follow hazardous waste management requirements.
   To avoid the onerous and expensive state and federal regulations, some companies have resorted to shipping CRTs overseas—especially to Asia—for recovery and/or disposal. This practice has reportedly declined considerably, however, following exposés that revealed that CRT processing and disposal activities overseas were virtually unregulated, posing threats to both workers and the environment.
   “No reputable company wants its name linked with such blatant environmental and human irresponsibility,” states Jim Glavin, vice president for metals at United Recycling Industries. “We’re even starting to see RFPs for CRT disposal that specify no exportation.”
   The economics and the ethics of handling CRTs are leading responsible corporations, municipalities, waste haulers, and electronics recyclers to seek alternatives to expensive landfilling and problematic (as well as potentially unethical) exportation.
   The ideal alternative would be domestic recycling of spent CRTs, a trend that is in fact gaining momentum. As Bob Glavin asserts, “Properly handled, CRTs can be 100-percent recycled.”
   While that may be true, currently only about 10 percent of old CRTs are recycled, and the U.S. CRT recycling industry is still a relatively small, new niche.

Going Glass-to-Lead
There are two main categories of CRT recycling—glass-to-lead, which focuses on recovering the lead in CRT glass, and glass-to-glass, which recycles old CRT glass directly back into new CRTs.
   All glass-to-lead operations generally follow the same processing steps: First, CRT-containing products such as computer monitors and televisions are shredded in their entirety. Second, any ferrous components are magnetically culled from the shredded stream. Next, the remaining shredded materials are pulverized, with the powdered glass being separated through a screening process from the mixed plastic and nonferrous stream. Some processors go a step further and separate the plastic from the nonferrous.
   Depending on the operation, the recovered nonferrous, ferrous, and plastics are sold to brokers or direct to consumers. The CRT recycler typically must pay a lead smelter to accept the leaded glass, which can be melted to reclaim the lead and the silica for use as a fluxing agent.
   One of the leading U.S. glass-to-lead recyclers is United Recycling Industries, which began as a precious metal refiner and expanded into a total computer recycling facility. Today, the company’s business is 20-percent electronics reconditioning/reselling and 80-percent recycling.
   United’s 300,000-square-foot facility in West Chicago houses its disassembly/reconditioning operations and its CRT recycling system, which came online in September 2002. The firm’s 60,000-square-foot precious metal refinery is
in Franklin Park, Ill.
   Notably, the firm’s CRT operations were financed in part by a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, which “shows that states are looking for environmentally friendly solutions to electronics recycling,” says Bob Glavin.
   In his view, the greatest concern and challenge in CRT recycling is “separating the glass from the rest of the media in an environmentally friendly manner. With six to eight pounds per monitor, lead is our single greatest problem.”
   To address that problem, United developed an automated system that manages discarded monitors and televisions from intake through final sorting of recoverable commodities, leaving no materials to be landfilled and having no environmental impact, the company says. Currently, United processes some 2 million to 2.5 million pounds a month of discarded electronics, with CRTs accounting for about 360,000 pounds of that monthly total.
   Demand continues to grow for United’s CRT recycling services, says Bob Glavin, who notes that the firm’s suppliers have two characteristics in common: “They’re environmentally conscious and PR conscious. They know we do 100-percent recycling with no landfilling and no exporting. We’re not the cheapest kids on the block, but we do what we say we will.”
   Gold Circuit Inc.—another leading glass-to-lead CRT recycler—also developed its CRT recycling operations from a related business. Originally a precious metal recovery house established in 1991, Gold Circuit last year made a major commitment to CRT processing by opening a 73,000-square-foot electronics recycling facility in Casa Grande, Ariz. The company’s headquarters facility in Chandler, Ariz., is devoted to asset recovery for resale.
   “We were handling asset recovery for major companies that couldn’t find an alternative to overseas for units that had to be discarded,” says Jim Greenberg, founder and president. “No reputable company wants to send them overseas, yet there wasn’t a recycling company that could handle them.”
   Gold Circuit’s Casa Grande plant has the capacity to process 1,000 monitors an hour through its automated system. Conveyors carry CRTs into the system, which shreds them and sorts the recoverable materials. Gold Circuit pays lead smelters to take the processed glass, while it sells the ferrous scrap to a broker and gives the mixed plastic/nonferrous stream to a firm that recovers the plastic and returns the nonferrous to Gold Circuit for sale to a broker.
   CRT suppliers pay Gold Circuit a tipping fee of 18 to 25 cents a pound. That fee accounts for the Casa Grande plant’s principal revenue, though the sale of the recovered commodities helps defray operating costs, Greenberg notes.
   Already, the company is planning to expand, with the potential to grow to two 10-hour shifts five days a week. There’s no doubt in Greenberg’s mind that the demand will be there.
   This demand will come, in part, from the growing number of municipal electronics collection programs, such as a three-day program in California that generated 400 tons of scrap electronics. Also, corporations will increasingly need electronics recycling services. One corporate client, for instance, recently shipped thousands of discarded PC monitors to Gold Circuit for recycling.
   “Everybody is trying to find the correct and economical way to recycle CRTs,” Greenberg says, adding that building the business to capacity “won’t be a problem.”

The Glass-to-Glass Approach
The CRT glass-to-glass recycling sector is dominated by a few large companies. One of them is Envirocycle Inc., a Hallstead, Pa.-based firm that provides complete electronics recycling services, from asset management for resale to glass-to-glass recycling, which is “the most environmentally sound method for CRT recycling,” says Joe Nardone, vice president, glass operations. “That way the product is a 100-percent recyclable commodity, and it’s in a closed-loop system.”
   Envirocycle’s process is based on a proprietary sorting and cleaning technique that separates the face plate from the funnel without shredding. This allows the glass to be returned as feedstock to CRT glassmakers. “Every glassmaker has a unique chemistry, so it can’t accept shredded glass that would be a mix of formulations,” Nardone says.
   At Envirocycle, incoming CRTs are first hand-sorted into black-and-white and color CRTs. Then the company’s proprietary sorting and cleaning system processes the units, separating the glass into leaded and unleaded streams as well as removing the specialized coatings on the glass. The end product is clean, reusable glass, sorted by formulation and lead content.
   “The entire operation is a wet process with a closed-loop water-handling system, which has no release to the environment,” Nardone says. Processed glass is stored completely under roof in a facility without floor drains to prevent potential groundwater contamination. The firm also tracks airborne hazards closely, constantly monitoring the plant’s air quality.
   Envirocycle currently has three sorting/cleaning units in production, running two shifts a day, with an intake of 35,000 CRTs a month. Due to anticipated future demand, the company is building an additional three sorting/cleaning units in-house.
   On the selling side, Envirocycle sold some 50,000 tons of recycled CRT glass in 2002 to glass manufacturers such as American Video Glass Co. and Techneglas Inc. With current market prices for clean, sorted CRT glass around $150 to $200 a ton, “it’s a profitable operation,” says Nardone.
   Dlubak Glass Co. (Upper Sandusky, Ohio) is another major glass-to-glass recycler as well as one of the oldest.
   Established in 1932 as a bottle recycler, the company now processes some 50,000 tons a year of CRT glass.
   “There’s not a pound of glass that can’t be recycled,” says Dave Dlubak, president. “It’s very profitable.”
   The firm’s Upper Sandusky facility occupies 15 acres, all hard-surfaced with full water containment. “I don’t find EPA regs prohibitive at all—but you have to know what you’re doing,” Dlubak says.
   Dlubak Glass acquires material by the truckload through brokers who collect it from Fortune 500 companies. At the end of the recycling operation, the only material landfilled is corrugated containers. Most of the recycled glass is sold to Corning Asahi Video, steel goes to a broker, and plastic is sold to a manufacturer of plastic lumber.
   Today, the four CRT glass manufacturers in the United States—American Video Glass, Techneglas, Corning, and Thompson RCA—use up to 10 percent postconsumer CRT glass in their production. With this steady but limited market for CRT glass and the dominance of the current players, there haven’t been any major new entries into this segment.

Changing Regulations
   A proposed change in EPA regulations for CRT recycling, however, could significantly change the composition of the industry in the near future.
   EPA has made it clear that it would like to increase the number of CRTs being recycled. It recognizes, though, that current regulations that classify CRTs as solid waste subject to hazardous waste regulations may be discouraging more recyclers from entering the market.
   In June 2002, EPA proposed a new rule on CRT recycling that would loosen some of the restrictions for handling discarded units. Under the proposed rule, discarded CRTs wouldn’t be considered waste, and the handling and disposal requirements for managing them in small quantities would be reduced from those mandated by hazardous waste regulations.
   Under the new rule, CRTs would be excluded from the definition of solid waste. Storage, labeling, and transportation requirements would be lessened. CRTs in transit to recyclers also wouldn’t be classified as waste, and processed CRT glass heading to the lead smelter or CRT glass plant would be reclassified from a waste to a commodity.
   The proposed rule “received a significant number of comments,” says ISRI’s John Hayworth, including a favorable one from ISRI. “We’re very supportive of this issue and see it as beneficial to our members,” he says, adding that “it could stimulate additional recycling that hasn’t been occurring.”
   EPA has sent up a trial balloon for these new regulations in the form of a test region. Effective Feb. 24, EPA Region III (Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia) implemented the rule as proposed. The agency plans to gather data from the trial to determine if it should adopt the CRT changes nationwide. Envirocycle is serving as the electronics recycling contractor for this test project.
   ReMA supports the trial run, as do recyclers such as Envirocycle’s Nardone. In his view, without the EPA’s proposed rule changes, “the CRT glass recyclers, and the glass-to-glass option, would cease to exist within the United States.”
   Some CRT recyclers outside of Region III, however, have complained about the test project, claiming that it could affect their businesses by limiting the transport of CRTs out of the region.
“Transportation of leaded glass outside of Region III will still be subject to hazardous waste regulations, so why would our customers in Region III want to deal with that when they could use a recycler in their region and avoid it?” asks one dissatisfied CRT processor.
   Recyclers also took issue with the definitions used in the ruling whereby only processes that clean CRT glass are considered glass recycling. Some argue that glass-to-lead recycling is an efficient technique for recycling CRTs, offering the advantages that incoming feedstock doesn’t need to be sorted by glass chemistry and the processed glass doesn’t have to meet the stringent standards of CRT glass manufacturers. These complaints, however, didn’t stop the EPA from launching its trial run as planned.
   While U.S. EPA is evaluating the merits of lightening up on CRT recyclers, some states seem headed toward tighter regulation, judging from the number introducing legislation related to CRT recycling or setting up councils to study the issue. Even if EPA lessens regulations on the federal level, states aren’t required to adopt EPA rules that are less strict than their own regulations.
   Despite the regulatory issues, Gold Circuit’s Greenberg believes CRT recycling will attract more competitors. “There’s room for more recyclers because the market is so huge,” he says. “In the next five years, this industry is going to be bursting at the seams.” 

A New Way to Get the Lead Out of CRTs?
A research team at the University of Oxford (Oxford, England) has developed a process that uses ultrasonic vibration and acid to dissolve the lead content from CRT glass.
   In the process, pulverized CRT glass is subjected to powerful ultrasonic vibrations while being treated with nitric acid. The vibrations reportedly break down particles to smaller sizes and erode their surfaces, continually increasing the surface area for the nitric acid to work on during the leaching process. The combined ultrasonic vibration/nitric acid process “greatly increases” the amount of lead dissolved out of the CRT glass—to more than 90 percent of the total leachable lead content, the researchers report. The dissolved lead can be recovered from the nitric acid onto a negatively charged electrode. The clean CRT glass, meanwhile, meets the standards required for reuse or for safe disposal in landfills, according to the researchers.
   While this research is intriguing, the proposed process only affects the surface area of the glass, says Joe Nardone of electronics recycler Envirocycle. “The research implies that the process cleans the glass, but in fact it only dissolves the lead on the surface,” he states. Since the lead in CRTs is present throughout the glass matrix, it would be necessary to totally dissolve the glass to recover the total amount of lead in the product, Nardone says. That may not be desirable, however, because “lead in a glass matrix is one of the most stable methods of keeping the lead from impacting the environment,” he notes.
   Still, now that this ultrasonic-vibration technology has been successfully tested on a laboratory scale, the next step is to pursue commercial-scale tests, the researchers say.
   For more information, contact Richard Compton, professor at the University of Oxford’s Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, 44/1865-275413; richard.compton@ chem.ox.ac.uk; or visit www.ox.ac.uk. •

Lynn R. Novelli is a writer based in Russell, Ohio.