Crunching computers | Brunswick's eWaste makes sure your electronic junk gets recycled
Some makers of televisions and computer monitors aren’t so happy about Maine’s electronic waste recycling law. The law, passed in 2004 and implemented in 2006, allows the state to bill manufacturers for the cost of recycling their TVs and computer monitors, which can contain toxic chemicals like mercury and lead.
Maine was the first state in the country to pass this so-called “producer-responsibility law” to keep these chemicals out of landfills. Residents now take their old screens to a municipal transfer station, and then an e-waste consolidator collects the junk, categorizes it and ships it to a recycler, which can sell the by-products, like plastic, lead and glass, back to manufacturers.
From January 2006 to January 2007, nearly six million pounds of Maine e-waste was recycled, according to a January 2008 report from Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Inspired by Maine, last year Connecticut, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas and Oregon passed their own e-waste recycling laws.
But a trade group called the Electronic Industry Alliance has sent a petition against Maine’s law to the federal Department of Transportation. The group believes the law violates federal rules for transporting hazardous waste. The DOT began accepting public comment on the petition May 6 and is expected to make a decision on the petition this summer, according to the Associated Press.
Even as Maine’s law is in jeopardy, one Maine company dealing with electronic waste is expanding. eWaste Recycling Solutions, a waste consolidator in Brunswick, by the end of July plans to move most of its operations to a 10,000-square-foot facility on the border of Auburn and Poland. Its current Brunswick warehouse can handle 125,000 pounds of waste per month, but the new facility could boost capacity to up to 800,000 pounds per month, according to CEO Rick Dumas.
eWaste Recycling Solutions formerly operated as EWS New England. But the name changed in April of this year when Dumas and business partner Mike Dorn began handling the Maine consolidation accounts of RMG Enterprise, a company in Londonderry, N.H., that mostly recycles electronic products. The owner of RMG, Bob Gallinaro, is now a partner in eWaste Recycling Solutions.
Mainebiz recently spoke with Dumas about the new partnership with RMG, the threat to Maine’s electronic waste law and exactly how they help a TV return to its maker. The following is an edited transcript.
Why did your company take over RMG’s Maine accounts?
We just saw a lot of synergies, a lot of areas where we were working side by side, and it was just everything from fuel savings on through [to] transportation costs. Why run two trucks when you can run one? They were actually our downstream supplier for recycling services. They were renting some space in Gorham. And then they had a trucking company bring it from Gorham down to Londonderry — actually then to Montreal. They started recycling in Londonderry just this year.
How many accounts did you get from RMG?
In terms of municipal accounts, it’s hard. Lincoln County Recycling is one of our [accounts], there are 28 communities that go through Lincoln County. [The] town of Freeport is one of our clients, they also serve Yarmouth, North Yarmouth, Durham, Pownal. I’d say we’re probably north of 50 municipalities. All told, there’s probably 18-20 municipal accounts.
How many of those were from RMG?
It probably wasn’t 50-50, but probably very close, RMG and from us [at eWaste Solutions].
What we really got was the client list. We put about $20,000 in just to cover transitional expenses. The upside of the Maine program is your invoices are owed by [established corporations like] General Electric, Sony, Dell. The downside of the program is by law we have to give them 90 days to pay their bill. So from a cash-flow standpoint, we sent out our first bill on the 24th of April and probably there was $42,000 in that billing cycle. Probably $31,000 of it’s still out there. So what we end up doing is selling our invoices to a bank in exchange for a line of credit.
How does that work?
It allows us to basically turn our invoices into cash. That’s always been the biggest hill to climb over. As you grow, there’s that 90 day advance period. And of course, the problem there is, the employees won’t get paid every two weeks, you’ve got trucking costs to pay for, the building to lease, and all the ongoing bills.
And so the bank has its own collection process?
They kind of love buying our paper because they like the credit worthiness of who our clients are — General Electronic, RG Electronic. Probably our top 30 clients are names that most people would recognize. The bank of course recognizes, too, [that] they’re looking at companies that in most cases are multi-billion dollar, multinational.
Can you explain, step-by-step, how the process works?
Right from the get-go we break it into two classifications: the Maine program and then everything else. Within the Maine program, what we’re required to do as material comes in is, literally every single television and every single monitor has to have its brand identified and its manufacturer identified. RCA, they’re manufactured by three different companies. We have to identify which of those companies are responsible for that one television set.
Then we compile all that data, and we send an invoice, say, to Thompson Electronics. “Here are the number of RCA television sets that are yours and their combined weight.” Sometimes it’s not very easy to determine. We have turned to really the best resource we’ve had and that’s DEP. If you give them a call and you say, “This is what I’m encountering,” in an hour you’ll have an answer.
Once we’ve determined all that, we then pack the material up and it goes on a tractor trailer truck and heads down to Londonderry and into the hopper through the crushing process. The plastics are pulled, the greenboard, the metal and then of course the glass. It’s boxed up and heads for Samsung. It goes through a cleaning process and turns into the next television set.
Samsung Corning has a facility for glass recycling. There are other companies out there that are smelting glass. They are basically separating the glass from the lead. There is a growing market for lead — lead acid batteries to store electricity. So we’re starting to see some interest from smelters.
With plastic, we may be seeing opportunities to recycle that into composite material, and we may be putting together a grant application to study that in the not too distant future. Stacy Ladner at the DEP, she was ecstatic about the idea that a recycling program that the state of Maine initiated could have a secondary aspect of creating jobs here from a byproduct of that program.
How much money can you get back from one piece of equipment in the Maine program?
[For a] monitor or television right now, generally it’s 40 cents a pound that we bill the manufacturer for. And there’s an exception to that. It’s what we call Option One. Manufacturers are allowed to designate their own recycler, in fact, because there were some avant-garde manufacturers who had recycling programs in place even before the Maine law to voluntarily say, “This is a service we want to offer to our clients.” And as part of the rule-making process with the state of Maine, what they said was, “We really would like to maintain the relationships with recyclers we have, can we build something in the law that allows us to do that?” And in fact they did. In those cases, it’s 36 cents a pound where we don’t do the recycling. We do everything else but we hand it off to whoever is the manufacturer designated for the recycling.
A group called the Electronic Industry Alliance has filed a petition to essentially overturn Maine’s e-waste recycling law. What’s your response to the petition?
As I look at it, I think it’s almost like the industry is shooting itself in the foot. We’re accountable for what we do with the material. If that process is completely gone, they’re probably still going to get stuck with recycling without having all the checks and balances currently provided under the Maine law. [If the law were repealed] it would definitely have some dire consequences for us.
In the future, would you ever imagine moving the headquarters? Why Maine?
We’ve probably considered it. The reason now is mostly because I live here. I grew up outside of Boston and moved here in 1985 and I love it here. Rick Clark, the other partner, is from Fairfield, so two of us live here. On the other hand, we do run into — and I’m sure so many businesses that you speak to on a regular basis say this — Maine is not too friendly in terms of the business environment from a regulatory or tax standpoint. And we’re on the far end of the transportation line. So I think we’ve discussed that we’d love to keep our headquarters here but that we would probably expand in other locations.
Kerry Elson, Mainebiz staff reporter, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
eWaste Recycling Solutions
9 Industrial Pky., Brunswick
CEO: Rick Dumas
Other partners: Rick Clark, Mike Dorn and Bob Gallinaro
Founded: April 2008
Employees: Four full-time and four part-time
Service: Collecting electronic waste, categorizing it and shipping it to a recycler, then billing the manufacturer for all recycling-related services
Projected revenue, 2008: $1.6 million
Contact: 449-1709
www.ewastemaine.com
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