November/December 2012
Time’s Up
At the same time consumers are discarding more and more cathode-ray tube devices, recyclers are finding fewer and fewer markets for CRT glass, creating a glut of material today that will be gone for good in the near future.
By Theodore Fischer
It’s nearly impossible to buy a new consumer electronic product containing a cathode-ray tube in North America or Europe these days, and the production of such devices in the rest of the world is slowing significantly as well. Industry insiders expect CRT production will halt altogether within the next decade, perhaps much sooner. This might be good news for electronics recyclers, who receive such devices at their end of life and have struggled to find markets for CRT glass. But it’s bad news as well: Until now, one of the most valuable markets for recycled CRT glass has been the production of new CRTs.
No developed country has facilities for manufacturing new CRTs from CRT glass, says David Cauchi of Closed Loop Refining & Recovery (Phoenix). In the emerging markets, Malaysia and China, which combined had 12 plants less than two years ago, now have one apiece. In India, the two surviving plants are expected to close by 2014, Cauchi reported at ISRI’s convention this past spring. Having few glass-to-glass recycling options is not the same as having none, however. More recent reports are that Videocon, a major electronics manufacturer based in Mumbai, India, now indicates it will continue producing CRTs until 2016, says Jerry Powell, president of Resource Recycling (Portland, Ore.), who presented information about CRT glass markets at the company’s 2012 E-Scrap Conference.
Some recyclers still supply the glass-to-glass market and are investing in technologies or processes to do so more efficiently. Universal Recycling Technologies (Janesville, Wis.) says on its website that its “state-of-the-art, automated de-manufacturing and recycling system” sorts CRT glass by type and chemistry to produce furnace-ready cullet that’s “reused for its original purpose”—new CRT glass. Out west, Electronics Recyclers International (Fresno, Calif.) began installing a CRT glass processing system, which it acquired on a proprietary basis from a European manufacturer, at its seven facilities in 2010. “We cut the panel off and separate that in a very unique way, doing multiple units at once,” says ERI Chairman and CEO John Shegerian. “Once the panel and funnel are separated, we put them into a cleaning system where no dust is created.” ERI, too, still sells most of its glass to CRT monitor remanufacturers.
What makes CRT glass difficult to recycle is its lead content. CRTs contain two types of glass joined by a leaded glass solder, called the frit. The screen, or panel, glass is considered essentially lead-free. The funnel glass behind it contains up to 22 percent lead, and the frit is up to 90 percent lead. The 250,000 tons of CRTs collected for recycling each a year in the United States generate 120,000 tons of panel glass and 95,000 tons of funnel glass, out of which is extracted 15,000 tons of lead, Closed Loop’s Cauchi says.
Though lead is considered a hazard when it enters the environment—it’s the primary reason some states have banned landfill disposal of CRTs and why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, D.C.) regulates their storage, handling, and export—when properly recycled it’s a desirable nonferrous metal. U.S. lead consumption levels have been steady, but demand in Asia and in emerging economies worldwide has been growing, reported Joe Pickard, ISRI’s chief economist and director of commodities, at the ReMA convention this past spring. “The demand for lead will continue to rise,” predicts Joe Clayton, sales director for Synergy Recycling (Madison, N.C.). “It’s used in batteries, and battery sales are exploding as more and more people in India and China are buying cars that use lead batteries.”
The main secondary lead smelters operating in North America—The Doe Run Co. (St. Louis), Teck Resources (Vancouver, British Columbia), and Xstrata (Zug, Switzerland)—can make use of both the lead and the glass in CRT cullet, with the latter serving as a flux agent, Powell explained at his conference session. Typically, CRT cullet is only a small portion of the infeed material, and some companies prefer cullet only from the CRT funnel and frit. Due to the weight of CRT glass, transportation costs tend to be high, Powell said, making these smelters a viable option only for nearby recyclers. Further, the lead smelters charge to take the glass—as do all other current end markets for the material, he points out. Several processors report charges that range from 8 to 10 cents a pound.
Given these limitations and costs in the existing glass-to-glass and glass-to-lead markets, electronics and glass recyclers, academics, and others interested in solving the end-of-life CRT problem are looking into new ways of processing CRT glass and new markets for the glass cullet.
Leaded Glass Alternatives
Ideally, markets for CRT glass cullet from both panel and funnel could make use of the glass in its existing state, lead and all. Jeremy Gregory, a research scientist in the MIT Materials Systems Laboratory (Cambridge, Mass.), names a few options in which the lead content would not be problematic. The material could be used as roadbed filler, but he points out that “anything can be used in roadbed filler, so you’re competing with all sorts of other ‘hazardous wastes.’”
Copper smelting can make use of both the lead and the silica in CRT glass, according to Robin Ingenthron, founder of Good Point Recycling (Middlebury, Vt.). Good Point’s parent company, American Retroworks, also in Middlebury, works with an electronics processing cooperative in Sonora, Mexico, that sells the glass from end-of-life CRTs to a nearby copper smelter. On his Good Point Ideas blog, Ingenthron explains that “the molten silica acts as a river to carry the copper, gold, silver, and zinc down the process line.” Further, the lead is essential to “the delicate chemistry” of the copper smelting process. The Mexican smelter uses 220 tons of leaded silicate a day. On paper, the smelter has offered to take up to 1,000 mt of CRT cullet a month, but the small, 10-person dismantling facility can’t produce anywhere near that volume, Ingenthron says. Still, that order indicates the magnitude of demand that would exist if U.S. copper smelters would accept this material. “In principle, there is more than enough demand today to consume all of the leaded glass in all of the warehouse[s], basements, concrete pads, and trailers in the [United States]” in U.S. copper smelters, Ingenthron writes, but opposition from well-meaning environmentalists has made smelters wary of taking secondary material. These smelters “dig up silica and dig up lead from the mountains” because doing so is subject to fewer regulations than using secondary material, he says. Gregory agrees that smelters of various metals could be a viable market for this material, “but it’s unclear whether the smelters have the capacity or are willing to handle all the CRT cullet.”
Other options for the use of leaded CRT cullet include “things like decorative tiles, but you’re not really going to be able to handle enough of the volumes,” MIT’s Gregory points out. Earlier this year, an Eco-Challenge sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association (Arlington, Va.), Environmental Defense Fund (New York), and InnoCentive (Waltham, Mass.) awarded three prizes for the most promising ideas for “responsibly and cost-effectively” recycling CRT glass. One winner outlined a process for combining CRT glass with cement to produce tile and bricks for facilities that require lead shielding, such as X-ray and fluoroscopy rooms.
Getting the Lead Out
A more promising approach is to extract enough lead from the CRT glass to make the glass suitable for other applications, though the challenge is to do it in an economically viable manner, Gregory says. “Glass is basically just sand, so it’s pretty cheap to get virgin materials. … Trying to get the lead out of the glass is just another cost step.” Any energy savings would depend on the energy needed to remove the lead from the glass, he points out. Recycling the glass itself “is not a huge energy savings because you have to heat up the cullet to get the glass molten—just like virgin glass—and remove the impurities.”
What’s the demand for lead-free CRT glass? According to Cauchi, each year fiberglass manufacturers consume 400,000 tons of clean cullet; producers of glass and ceramic proppant (material used in hydraulic fracturing to hold open the fractures and allow the collection of natural gas) use 200,000 tons; glass beadmakers use 100,000 tons; and—ironically—flat-panel display manufacturing uses another 100,000 tons. Shegerian says he sees “beacons of hope emerging in the commercialization of other uses of clean CRT glass, both in finished materials in homes and commercial use in terms of kitchens and bathrooms.”
Several companies are launching new ventures to make CRT glass more marketable through various processes of lead removal and sortation. ECS Refining (Santa Clara, Calif.) has launched a new company, Regenesys Glass Processing, to extract the metal oxides from CRT glass and chemically blend the glass for use by the automotive, fiberglass, bead, and lighting industries. With initial facilities planned for Texas, Ohio, and California, Regenesys’ goal is to make glass pure enough for the fussiest customers, it says. One problem with CRT cullet is the wide range of lead it might contain, says Curt Spivey, ECS’ vice president of corporate development. “The panel, unbeknownst to a large number of people, could have from 0.05 parts per million [of] lead”—the amount you might typically find in a drinking glass or pickle jar, he says—“up to 8 percent lead. … If you can separate the panel from the funnel, and guarantee that you have [no more lead than] 0.05 parts per million, there are consuming opportunities and repurposing uses in this country. But if these large consumers that make beads or fiberglass or auto [components] are not guaranteed that [the glass is] lead-free, they’ve got a problem because it will destroy their equipment.” At least one major CRT glass consumer, Dlubak Glass Co. (Upper Sandusky, Ohio), “knows and trusts our process,” Spivey says. Regenesys plans to announce a patent-pending separation process and a new destination for CRT funnel glass before the end of the year, he adds. The company’s goal is the “complete, 100-percent domestic reuse of the material” in a CRT.
Dlubak is working with Regency Technologies (Twinsburg, Ohio) on a facility adjacent to the Dlubak plant in Upper Sandusky that will break down items containing CRT glass, process them in a furnace, and market the resulting cullet for paving, building construction, and aggregate products. Cement manufacturing is one such use, and Dlubak recently signed a 10-year agreement with a major cement company to provide at least 50,000 tons a year of powdered cullet containing some CRT glass for use as a filler and strengthener in Portland cement. The cement company plans to install $10 million worth of equipment in a plant that also will be adjacent to Dlubak’s Upper Sandusky facility. That agreement “certainly changes the capacity picture” for CRT cullet, says MIT’s Gregory.
Other winners of the abovementioned Eco-Challenge were a Spanish environmental engineer, who proposed a closed-loop process for removing the lead and producing glass with high market value for several industries, and Nulife Glass Processing (Manchester, England), which proposed an energy efficient, low emissions, electrically heated furnace for extracting the lead from crushed CRT glass. It took more than 15 years of trial and error to get the technology up to speed, says Simon Greer, the company’s director and founder. “We finally got [it] to work, and the glass that was left was less than 1 percent lead content,” which passed UK and European Union limits and also the U.S. toxicity characteristic leaching procedure, he says. The Nulife plant, which measures 33 feet by 20 feet and is 23 feet high, can process up to 10 mt of CRT glass a day. It runs on three-phase, 480-kW electrical power and requires supplies of natural gas to start the furnace and water for the cooling system. The furnace produces lead that’s more than 99.7-percent pure, the company says.
Nulife has one furnace operating at its Manchester headquarters, and it’s marketing the plant to recyclers worldwide. Though it hasn’t found any U.S. buyers yet, it is constructing its own U.S. facility on a 25-acre site in Dunkirk, N.Y., that will run on hydroelectric power generated at Niagara Falls. The company is considering building similar facilities elsewhere in the Northeast and Northwest.
Despite the promise of these new technologies and markets, they’re unlikely to change the fact that CRT glass is a cost center, not a profit center, for electronics recyclers. “There is no market for reuse of CRT monitors anymore, and nothing is going to increase the value of this glass,” Clayton says. “There are plenty of processes to take the lead out of the glass, but all of them cost more money than they generate.” R2/RIOS™-certified companies have had to internalize the negative value of the glass and the cost of processing glass into their daily operations, which better equips them to handle the problem, he adds.
Nulife’s Simon Greer sees the CRT glass problem as a bubble that eventually will burst. It’s “becoming bigger and bigger every week because more people are switching to other things, and the alternative methods of getting CRTs recycled are shutting off by the day, so there’s nowhere for this stuff to go,” he says. “We’ve got our process working, and we’re going to take the glass into storage and process it. We are going to take in stock for each furnace to run for 10 years, but once it stops, it’s gone—that’s it.”
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
CRT’s Changing Regulatory Environment
At the same time U.S. recyclers are beating the bushes for markets for CRTs and CRT glass, the federal and state governments are changing how they regulate these troublesome materials.
In March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, D.C.) proposed changes to its 2006 CRT Rule provisions on exports of CRTs and CRT glass and recordkeeping related to those exports. To reduce confusion over who’s responsible for fulfilling the duties outlined in the rule—and assign blame if things go wrong—the proposed revisions would define CRT exporter as “any person in the United States who initiates a transaction to send used CRTs outside the United States or its territories for recycling or reuse, or any intermediary in the United States arranging for such export.” The EPA wants one entity involved with the export to perform the duties of notification, recordkeeping, and reporting, but this change makes it clear the agency can hold all persons associated with the export jointly liable for failing to comply with the requirements.
The proposed rule changes also would require exporters of used CRTs for recycling to submit detailed annual reports to the EPA that include names and addresses of foreign customers along with the estimated quantity of CRTs each will receive so the agency can better track shipments and determine compliance. The additional recordkeeping and reporting would cost each CRT exporter between $7,300 and $11,500 a year, the agency estimates.
Eric Harris, ISRI’s associate counsel and director of government and international affairs, describes the proposed rule changes as “more tweaks than anything else,” noting that ISRI’s SREA Reasonable Care Compliance Program (www.isri.org/srea) can give ReMA members the tools they need to comply with the new reporting requirements. ReMA did submit comments that argued that fully functioning CRTs should not be under the same controls as a material moving for recycling outside the scope of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; therefore, the EPA lacks the jurisdiction to do some of the actions the revisions propose.
The dearth of markets for CRT glass have some electronics recyclers struggling with a different aspect of the CRT Rule—its limits on the storage of this material. “You have to process 75 percent of the CRT glass you bring in every year or you’re caught doing ‘speculative accumulation,’” says Joe Clayton, sales director for Synergy Recycling (Madison, N.C.). The rule can discourage recyclers’ investment in CRT processing equipment by not allowing them to accumulate sufficient material to make the investment worthwhile, he explains. “From a simple math and economic point of view, you want to amortize equipment over 10 [to] 15 years, and if you can store material for only one year, it’s a tough sell.” The EPA has asked ReMA to make recyclers aware that they can file for a speculative accumulation variance, Harris says, “which would give recyclers some relief on how long they can hold on to that glass.” Recyclers interested in applying for a variance should refer to EPA regulations CFR 260.30 (a) and 260.31(a), Harris says.
To date, 25 states have passed electronics recycling laws that address CRTs, according to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (San Francisco), and at least 16 of those states ban the landfilling of CRT-containing devices. Several of the remaining 25 states are considering e-scrap laws, but the momentum “has slowed down a bit,” Harris says. A significant state regulatory change is on the horizon in California, which has proposed emergency regulations that would relax its strict rules on CRT glass disposal for a two-year period. Its 2004 e-scrap law allowed companies that handle CRTs and CRT glass to send material only to manufacturers that recycle it into new CRT glass or to lead smelters. The emergency regulations would, under certain conditions, permit other recycling options and allow the disposal of intact CRTs or CRT funnel and frit glass in hazardous waste landfills and CRT panel glass in solid waste landfills.
Even if the proposed emergency regulations were to take effect, California electronics recyclers that have been certified to various standards would need to ensure their handling of CRTs and CRT glass still meets those standards. In its September e-newsletter, R2 Solutions (Boulder, Colo.) noted the R2 standard would continue to prohibit the landfilling of CRT glass because glass-to-glass recycling and lead smelting are both still available in North America.