The Greener Gadgets summit convened a panel of four top experts in the field of eycling (e-waste recycling,) who presented some innovative solutions for solving this problem: Ron Gonen CEO of RecycleBank, Michael Newman VP of ReCellular, Carl Smith CEO or RBRC (Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp.) and David Thompson Environmental Director at Panasonic.

 

Above is a video excerpt from Newman's company, ReCellular which focuses on the single enormous problem of discarded cell phones – over 130,000 thrown away per day – by finding new uses for old phones and reclaiming valuable materials from non-functioning phones.

 

Carl Smith, former GreenGuard CEO, now heads up RBRC which focuses exclusively on rechargeable batteries, recycling 7 million pounds of rechargeable batteries per year via 40,000 pick up sites in the U.S. and Canada. You can look up your local battery recycling stations here.

 

One of the biggest problems with recycling e-waste is that consumer electronics products are not designed from the outset to use standard parts across multiple product lines and by multiple manufacturers. So Panasonic has been leading the charge to fix this problem, creating a consortium of the 23 largest electronics manufacturers to collaborate in creating a cradle-to-cradle approach to collecting and reusing materials. They just launched a pilot program which will expand to hundreds of locations this year, including Goodwill and U-Haul.

 

Check out Part 1 of this post: RecycleBank will pay you to recycle