When, as a young teenager, Eric Lundgren started his first electronic recycling company (Environmental Computer Associates) in the small farming town of Lynden, Washington, he probably couldn't have foreseen that the cause he believed in would take him to a most unlikely place: federal prison.
As the founder of our nation’s first and largest hybrid electronics recycling company, Eric’s efforts keep over 19,000 Metric Tons of e-waste from our landfills every year. He has also served as an advisor to Ghana's vice president in the country's attempts to clean up the world's largest toxic e-waste dump (Agbogbloshie, Accra). And then, of course, there's the electric car he built almost entirely out of recycled consumer waste - The Phoenix. Currently holding the Guinness World Record as "The World's Longest Range Electric Vehicle," (with a 999.5 Mile Range) it can travel 200% farther than any mass-produced electric vehicle, including Tesla.
In spite of his accomplishments as an e-waste recycling pioneer, Eric's replication of a free online Dell repair tool called a "restore disc" in 2013 - an attempt to encourage repairs/refurbishment and prevent e-waste - led to a controversial legal battle against Microsoft and the DOJ that culminated in the Oregon prison where he is now serving the last 42 days of his fifteen month sentence.
As he counts down to his approaching release date, Eric Lundgren, much like his record breaking car's namesake, has plans for a dramatic rise from the ashes. In time for Earth Week, Eric gives us his take on e-waste and publicly introduces, for the first time, a national solution that he has built to try to end the e-waste crisis in America .
Vianney Vaute: In your own words, why should anyone care about waste management anyway?
Eric Lundgren: To not care about waste management is to not care about life. It’s a simple truth: humans are part of their environment. If you doubt this fact, just open your eyes or ask Alexa. What you choose to put in your trash directly affects your health and the health of everyone you love. Good or bad, it comes back to us via the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. That’s more than enough reason to pay attention to our trash.
Burying our waste in holes dates back to the Neanderthals. The holes have just gotten much larger since then. Up until the time my grandfather was born that solution was very effective, but since then, our waste streams have completely changed. A majority of our waste comes from non-organic chemical compounds. Although these mass-produced modern products are cheap and durable, they are literally killing us!
From single-use plastics to electronic waste, the life-cycles of our products are shrinking while our landfills grow exponentially, in mass and in toxicity. We should be recycling and reusing this waste.
Vaute: What made you decide to focus on e-waste?
Lundgren: For 99.9% of the time that humans have been around, Mother Nature has always managed to clean up our mess naturally. Around the 1950’s, when we began introducing synthetic materials into the mix, that started to change because the trash not only started taking longer to degrade, it also started to become more toxic.
E-waste comprises 70% of toxic waste in our landfills, even as it makes up just 2% of our solid waste stream. It contains thousands of different toxic, non-organic chemical compounds and heavy metals such as Lead, Mercury, Bromine, Cadmium, Arsenic, etc. that leach into our soil, water table, food and eventually our bodies. Within the last decade every fresh water stream in the USA has been contaminated by Mercury, directly linked to discarded e-waste. Every freshwater fish has traces of mercury, as do the mass majority of Americans.
Just think, if we properly aggregate and recycle our electronic waste we can effectively eliminate 70% of our toxic waste problem. If we don’t succeed in doing so, we’re in deep trouble: E-waste is not only the most toxic waste stream but the fastest growing. 48.5 million tons of e-waste was produced globally in 2019 - that’s like multiplying the Statue of Liberty by 200 - and that number is on track to hit 120 million tons by 2021. At this rate, unless we act now, this toxic trash pandemic and its negative health repercussions will soon become impossible to bury. No pun intended.
Vaute: How do you define e-waste anyway? The Global E-Waste Monitor seems to define it very broadly, just about anything with a battery or a plug.
Lundgren: When I talk about e-waste, short for electronic waste, I’m referring specifically to items that contain printed circuit boards (PCB's), LCD Screens, Batteries or integrated circuit (IC) chips. Per pound, this is the material that contains the majority of toxic substances. Some examples are computers, cellphones, telecom equipment, servers, electronic medical devices, point-of-sale terminals and lithium ion batteries.
Electronic waste that does not contain the components listed above is what we call "universal waste" and it is considered much less harmful (by weight) to our landfills and environment. Universal waste predominantly consists of ferrous and non-ferrous metals that oxidize naturally without the same level of toxicity. Some examples are washing machines, dryers, toasters, ovens, AC-Units, electric water heaters, etc.
Vaute: What about recycling? Isn’t that doing the job?
Lundgren: Mankind has always practiced some kind of recycling in an effort to extend the usefulness of things. Cavemen would pass their tools down to their offspring and Native Americans would retrieve their spears and arrows from a dead carcass after a hunt. This kind of recycling can be called “Reuse Recycling,” meaning extending the life-cycle of a product to serve its original purpose.
The other two kinds of recycling are what most people are referring to when they talk about recycling. There’s “Commodity Recycling,” which is the extraction and reuse of commodities for a new product to serve a new purpose. It’s a kind of urban mining that has the potential to be much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly in comparison to regular mining. Then there’s “Hybrid Recycling,” which is the reuse of generic parts and components for a new product to serve a new purpose.
Recycling has always been meant to save time, energy and resources. The issue arises when recycling fails to do so. With the way e-waste recycling is currently set up, for example, a person is expected to spend time, energy, (and sometimes even their money) to recycle items that they have already paid to own. It’s no wonder that only 20% of e-waste is reported to be recycled at all, in some shape or form.
Vaute: So do you think it’s just a matter of people being too lazy to recycle their e-waste?
Lundgren: No, not at all. It’s a much bigger issue. Out of the 20% of e-waste that is reported to have been recycled only 15.5% globally is aggregated and processed correctly - and most of it comes from the corporate sector. There currently aren’t any effective solutions for the big problem I want to solve, which is consumer e-waste.
Part of the reason is because the way recyclables are currently aggregated leads to a lot of contamination. A study done in Austin, for example showed that 50% of recyclables sampled had to be thrown away because of food waste that prevented it from being properly processed.
Triage, aggregation, and logistics are a big challenge for recyclers on many levels, and not just because of contamination. In order to make the most out of their overhead costs, most, if not all, recyclers only accept specific kinds of products for processing according to the kind of commodities or parts that they are trying to extract for reuse. This also affects consumers, who are forced to find recyclers that will accept the specific type of e-waste that they want to recycle. As a result, most e-waste is triaged, aggregated and shipped several times prior to ending up at the proper R2 Certified Refinery specializing in a specific waste-stream.
Beyond that, not all e-waste has the same value. Some categories of e-waste are “low value” or even “no value” and it doesn’t make economic sense for recyclers to process these unless in bulk, and for many it doesn’t make sense to process these kinds of e-waste at all. With the high volumes of e-waste coming in, municipalities have few solutions for processing them. Philadelphia, for example, now burns half of their recyclables in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time and energy to help people in Ghana to stop burning their waste - and now, we are starting to burn our waste-streams here in the USA.
Challenges like these are the reason e-waste is often shipped to other countries for processing (although China just stopped accepting our low value e-waste this year). Unfortunately, once e-waste is out of the country there is no guarantee that it will be processed as it should be, especially if it’s shipped to countries that have few regulations or that have problems implementing them. I have been to many of these countries and have seen firsthand the sickness that plagues a society when its toxic waste streams are improperly processed: poisoning, boiling acid lakes, disease and death.
Vaute: And this is where your company and platform comes in?
Lundgren: Yes, TechDirect, Inc. is the company under which I plan to operate the platform I have built to address the challenges, both on the consumers’ side and the recyclers’ side, that have been getting in the way of solving our e-waste problem.
The cloud-based platform that I will soon make available to the public will be the first national e-waste recycling solution, allowing every American to recycle their e-waste for free without leaving their home and every certified electronics recycler to mitigate high aggregation, triage, and logistical overhead costs.
Vaute: That sounds extremely ambitious. What are you referring to when you talk about this “platform?”
Lundgren: The platform refers to our index of all SERI (R2) and ISO 18001:14001 certified recyclers in the US and the proprietary algorithms, artificial intelligence and logistics API’s that we have built to automate the triage, aggregation, and logistics and manifesting process involved in e-waste recycling. The platform will make it possible for people to easily recycle their electronics from the convenience of their own homes using a free and simple solution and for end refineries to receive pure commodity streams while minimizing costs and remaining profitable.
The end goal is even more ambitious than it appears - it isn’t simply to maximize the amount of e-waste recycled but to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) partially achieve the holy grail in manufacturing: a “closed-loop” manufacturing process. By giving OEMs the ability to aggregate, triage, manifest and quantify their recycling efforts (by volume per state) they will not only save millions of dollars currently spent on ineffective recycling solutions and analytics, but above all, have the opportunity to reuse their original commodities in new products.
Vaute: What will recycling look like through the platform versus what it looks like today?
Lundgren: Currently when people recycle they usually drop their things off at an aggregation point, like Goodwill or a local recycling drive that works with recyclers. Otherwise, a consumer would have to find an electronics recycler that will accept the kind of electronics they want to recycle and coordinate with them to get their e-waste to the location, usually by mail or driving there to drop it off.
With my platform, e-waste will be picked up directly from each person’s home and shipped and recycled for free. It would take 5 minutes to use through the website or application. Basically, they would identify the items they want to recycle, put these in a box or boxes, slap on the free shipping label and then put it outside the door for free pickup. Once the box is picked up, it is then delivered to the closest and most appropriate EPA/R2 certified recycler for processing. Every package, piece and pound will be tracked downstream by our platform through this recycling process.
Vaute: It seems a little too good to be true. How do you plan to pick up, ship, and sort all these packages of e-waste for the public free of charge?
Lundgren: This solution is very real and I look forward to sharing the details with you soon. I’m waiting until I’m out of prison and the platform is out of beta to share how it works. What I will say for now is that using our collaborative logistics model, shipping costs for each package will be quantified in real-time and offset by its recycled commodity value.
Vaute: Maybe this is nitpicking, but what about all the individual boxes you are shipping that need to be palletized? Won’t that add to recyclers’ costs? Also, what about the Carbon footprint of all these deliveries?
Lundgren: You're right, we are talking about tens of millions of boxes per year and packing material that need to be recycled as well. My hometown of Lynden collects cardboard boxes, bails them and uses the proceeds to pay for a new school bus every year. Recycling cardboard and packing material is easy and worth the while in such high volumes.
We have a commodities partner that is offering to buy all the cardboard for recycled paper and provide a bailer in contract at each certified recycling facility for efficient processing. In our trials, the cardboard commodity value alone offsets the labor costs associated with "de-boxing" the e-waste at the refinery. The plan is to let nothing go into a landfill.
Vaute: Do you expect government subsidies or anything like that to help pay for this free recycling service?
Lundgren: I think JFK had it right when he said that solutions don’t come from the government, they come from people. This platform is meant to be self-sustaining, and will create wealth instead of draining it. By eliminating inefficiencies recyclers will profit from e-waste as they haven’t been able to before.
If we had properly triaged, aggregated and recycled the 48.5 million tons of e-waste we discarded in 2018 it could have generated $62.5 billion dollars in commodity value. There is absolutely no need for government subsidies. Heavy metals alone are in very high demand and only 15% is being recycled.
Vaute: How and when did you build this platform? Is it really ready to go?
Lundgren: I first thought about this platform in 2009 when I was studying hybrid e-waste recycling methods in Shenzhen, China. Back then, reverse logistics was still very new and we didn’t have all the technology in place to create the solution so I tabled the idea for a later date.
Thanks to my forced government vacation, nine years later, I have been blessed with a year of solitude to calculate all the commodity values, logistics variables, processing costs, and more. We were able to construct our database and program all the algorithms required for the back-end of the platform as well, but not without a lot of effort.
Since I am in prison and do not have access to a real computer, the majority of our database programming and logistics algorithms were created using a standard #2 pencil and calculator. A lot of smart people told me it couldn’t be done but as my grandfather always said, “When there’s a will, there’s a way.” 9 months, a lot of pencils, and hundreds of letters later, the database and algorithms are now complete, the wire-frames and site map are done, screenshot pages are being turned into our GUI and it’s finally almost finished. I understand those that will doubt such a grandiose solution. It’s easier to doubt than to dream.
Vaute: So, when does this solution go live and when can we expect it to end the e-waste crisis?
Lundgren: The hard part is over. The platform is in beta testing and is set to go live nationwide on September 24th this year. Although it will immediately provide every American with a free recycling solution, I think it will take a few years to hit critical mass. Within 3 years, we plan to recycle more e-waste through this platform alone than our entire country recycles today. Once people learn how to use this free recycling tool, its scalability for processing e-waste in the United States is virtually endless.
Vaute: Thanks for sharing your big vision with us. It’s hard to imagine you might have your sights set on anything else given the scale of your current project, but just for the sake of asking, what’s next for you?
Lundgren: Innovation is a mountain we love to climb one step at a time. Given the size of this current project, it will take a while to perfect. After America has a true self-perpetuating recycling solution for all of our toxic e-waste, I would like to turn my attention to a different type of waste in our society. I am interested in "recycling lives" because nothing deserves to be recycled more than a wasted life.
America leads the world in incarceration with its extremely high recidivism rate. My next internet platform will provide those released from incarceration with geo-local community support networks, education and employment opportunities. I would like to help these people find their value and provide healthy ways to reintegrate back into society. If we can effectively lower this recidivism rate by a mere 1%, that will save 1,400 lives and billions of tax-payer dollars every year that are currently being wasted in a broken system that throws felons (and their families) aside in the social equivalent of our landfills.
There is a fine line between crazy and genius. I hope the world will judge me by what I’ve created. And God, by my heart.
