Original subtitles

[narrator] Welcome on this episode of Tomorrow's World Today.

We visit the world of innovation

to learn how mining has evolved

since the days of the California gold rush,

how privacy protection has evolved when it comes to recycling electronics.

How electronics recycling helps our environment

and the precious metals found inside our electronics scrap

from Inventionland world headquarters.

Here's our host, George Davison.

The California gold rush back in the mid-1800s

brought over 300,000 people to that state

hoping to strike it rich.

Prospectors would tediously pan for gold,

and on average 50 pans over the course of a day

would yield just a tiny fraction of gold dust.

Today, you don't need to head out west to mine for gold.

Chances are, it's right there in your pocket.

Electronics are full of valuable materials like copper, gold, silver,

and recycling these and other precious metals,

that's going to supply over 50% of the raw material

that we need in US manufacturing.

In fact, the United States recycles enough copper every year

to provide copper for up to 25,000 statues of liberty.

And it's not just copper.

For every million cell phones that are recycled,

you'll get about 75 pounds of gold

and 772 pounds of silver.

The question is, how will you do this?

Well, it's actually a very delicate process

that's been invented to extract these metals.

And we're going to look into this innovative

electronics recycling process

with the help from the experts who actually invented it

over at Regency Technologies.

You see, back in the 1990s,

there was an entrepreneur by the name of Jim Levine,

who founded Regency Technologies.

And his focus was the repair and resale of electronics.

That in and of itself back then was very innovative.

And initially that worked well.

But as new technologies continued to roll out faster and faster,

Jim observed that he was ending up

with more scrap than the items that he could repair and resell.

So he knew he needed to solve this problem.

And he reached out to a friend in the recycling industry.

And together they created a system to recycle IT hardware.

After five months of inventing and tweaking all these systems,

these pioneers created a new type of recycling business

that mined these precious metals,

and helped to create a more environmentally friendly way

to achieve raw materials that we need.

So in this episode of Tomorrow's World Today,

we're heading to Regency Technologies

to learn firsthand about the innovations

happening today in the electronics recycling industry.

If you've ever been curious about the process of recycling electronics,

and specifically what happens to your items

after you drop them off at places like Best Buy,

I've come to Regency Technologies to learn more.

Hi, I'm here to meet with Jim Levine.

He's right over there in the boardroom already waiting for you.

- Great, thanks. - Thank you.

Darieth, hi. Come on in. Grab a seat.

- Great, good to meet you, Jim. - Good to meet you as well.

Why don't we get started with you telling me

the difference between e-waste and e-scrap?

Well, Darieth, scrap is not waste. Scrap has value.

Waste is something that would typically end up in a landfill.

What are some of the common misconceptions that consumers have?

A lot of consumers, I believe,

feel that when they dispose of their old electronics,

that somehow they end up in a landfill

when in reality for over 20 years

there's been a robust industry

around recycling electronics.

What's wrong with using landfills?

Technically there's nothing wrong with using a landfill.

But they've been overused for years.

And the problem that we face is global warming,

harmful greenhouse gas emissions and similar things.

At Regency we're very focused

on the three R's of recycling, reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Why don't I introduce you to Anthony Magistrelli

who helped us to develop a relationship with Best Buy

to recycle all of their consumer electronics?

Come on with me.

Darieth, let me introduce you to Anthony Magistrelli.

He is our Best Buy man.

- Hey, Anthony. - How you doing, Darieth?

Tell me more about your relationship with Best Buy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, as you can see here, this is a good representation

of I think what we're all guilty of.

Old electronics in our basements, in our closets,

in our offices.

We wanted to find a way to get consumers equipment

back to our locations.

Now I can see you've got a bunch of old stuff

from sound bars to camcorders, even an old DVD player.

How much are you actually collecting?

Yeah, well think about it.

Best Buy has 1100 stores around the country.

So we're able to reach a vast amount of people

to collect millions of pounds of this material,

truckloads daily back to all of our locations.

Now, once you get them back to your locations,

how do you determine what you reuse and what you recycle?

Yeah, so our team will go through these items

and they'll look at older items like this.

An old camcorder probably doesn't have a second life to it.

So we're gonna go ahead and recycle that.

But items that might have the ability to be resold, like this tablet,

we're gonna go through it, we're gonna data wipe the material

and sell it back to the secondary market.

Let me show you where the magic happens.

[Darieth] No matter how dated you may think your old electronics are,

whether it's a tablet with a broken home button,

or even a camcorder no one's used since the 90s,

they don't have to end up in the trash and headed to a landfill.

We're at Regency Technologies in Stow, Ohio

to learn more about how electronics can be reused

and recycled.

Okay, Darieth, welcome to the Regency Technologies loading docks.

This is where everything begins.

As you can see here, there'll be unloading material

that will be processed through our location.

Every single pallet gets a placard sticker

that will help us to identify where the material is at any moment in time

throughout our process.

Yeah, Jim, this place is so busy.

And I can imagine throughout all eight of your locations

there's a lot going on.

But how much are you receiving at any given time?

Great question.

On any given day, we could have upwards of 50 truckloads a day,

that turns into over 100 million pounds a year of electronics

that will be destined for recycling.

Wow. And then where do the items go from here?

From here we're going to go to our triage department.

Okay, Darieth, welcome to the triage department.

Interestingly enough, when you said the word "triage" earlier,

I was thinking more like hospital, gurney,

the traditional use of the word "triage".

That is a very typical response that we get

when we hear triage department,

but in our world triage means something a little bit different.

This, Darieth, is where we determine the route of the material

whether it's going to go to recycling

or whether it's going to go for further reuse.

Yeah, I see all kinds of stuff in here, printers, computers, laptop boards.

Yes, toners, cartridges, cords and cables.

This is where it all starts.

Why don't I take you down to the sort line

- and see where everything happens next. - Okay.

Here in sorting, you can see

where material is being sorted for further recycling.

We've got cables and cords, ink cartridges, old keyboards

and other similar items destined for recycling.

Here we are with equipment that has been sorted

that is worthy of further resale we hope.

All of this equipment, the laptops, CPUs, or processors and memory,

that will now find its way into our tech center

for audit repair and further resale.

Darieth, welcome to our tech center.

I'd like to introduce you to the brains behind our system,

Samir and Steven.

Steven runs our operations

and Samir runs all of our tech centers.

Great. Good to meet you guys.

So Samir, how about if you take me on a tour of the tech center?

Absolutely. Let's go.

- We'll catch up with you guys later. - Okay, great.

So, Darieth, this is the tech center

and everything that is here on these pallets,

all the material that you see

has already met our disposition and triage

and it's something that is going down that path

to be resellable, repairable and teched.

There are a lot of items in here.

How do you even keep track of everything?

There really are, Darieth.

As a matter of fact, we have a pretty extensive ERP system.

And as you can see, every one of our products has a serial number on it.

And that allows us to track it back

to the supplier that it came in from,

where it is physically on our floor,

- and what the next step for that item is. - What is the next step?

From here it goes on to one of our tech's benches.

This is one of our testing benches.

As you can see here, Paula has this machine that she's testing,

we've opened it up checked all the physical components,

we run a video test on it, make sure that that works.

And then we run it through our ERP system

to grab all the information off of that machine

the make, the model, all the specs

so it can be sold to our customer.

Now I'd assume customers might be concerned

about things working properly.

- How do you ensure that? - Absolutely.

After this machine leaves this bench,

it goes through our quality control process,

where we're testing all the key functionalities

and making sure we're selling that customer

a 100% tested working machine.

Now the next part of this process is making sure

that all the data is being erased,

so we'll take you to our data erasure process.

These are hard drive wiping arrays.

This is where we plug in hard drives.

This machine tests them,

wipes them per industry standard.

If that drive fails this wipe, they go into a shredder.

And if they pass the wipe,

they get bagged into these pink bags with a label,

which ensures that it's a tested working hard drive,

goes back into the machine or goes out onto the market.

Let me take you to our cleanroom next.

So, Darieth, this is our cleanroom.

As you can see here, we've got some better air filtration, cleaner floors,

an environment that allows us to safely open up these electronics

and work on the components

all the way down to the board level.

So as you can see here, Jared has a main control board

out of a home audio receiver

that is working on replacing components

all the way down to the microchip level.

So this is the part of the process for repairing consumer electronics.

You can see here on these tablets, we're replacing screens,

same with cell phones, screen replacements, batteries, cameras,

all the way down to drones and laptops

that have come from our technicians' benches.

So, I can see here with these four laptops,

you have them labeled with the problem that they have

- so that you can fix it. - That's correct.

Each one of these has a label that identifies the issue with it.

And what we try to do is take multiple of the same laptop

and try to convert it into one working item

that we can sell back out on the market.

Let me show you how we sell those.

Wow, are these all the laptops we saw from earlier today?

- Looks like they're all ready to go. - Yep, they're ready to go.

So these have all gone through the process.

They've been tacked, audited, repaired, refurbished

and ready to go along with these desktops

and anything you see in this area.

So the next step would be take some photos,

we've got some editors that edit all the photos and the listings,

they go out to our ecommerce platforms.

And as soon as they're sold, we get ready to ship it.

[Darieth] When you're ready to upgrade your electronics,

you may start by taking your old piece of equipment

to a store like Best Buy,

who in turn brings it to a recycling facility

to figure out what happens next.

So far, we've looked at all of the different ways electronics can be recycled

or refurbished.

Now we're going to look at what happens to items that simply can't be reused.

So Steven, explain to me what's happening here.

Sure. So we saw the triage process

and how material is diverted either for tech or recycling.

Now we're going to see how the recycling actually happens.

Here we have our dismantling line

where we're taking apart laptops, desktops, servers,

and on that line over there, we're actually taking apart TVs and monitors.

And this is how you can determine

what you're going to be able to reuse from each of these items?

Correct. What we're trying to do is take it apart

and make sure that we can create a commodity

that's able to be resold.

So there's two main reasons why we're taking them apart.

One, for value recovery,

we create better quality products.

And two, because we're removing focus materials

that cannot go through recycle.

As you can see they're taking them apart by hand tools

and separating them into their bare commodities.

So plastic, steel, aluminum boards

are being tossed onto the belt.

And as you'll see at the end,

somebody is sorting them into their various commodity boxes.

So the end goal on this process

is to create as clean of a product as we can create.

You see here that you have some steel,

we got aluminum, copper stainless separating into its bare commodities

so that we can send it downstream to a recycler.

Over here we have the focus materials that we've talked about earlier.

So one being batteries.

Obviously, you don't want to put batteries through your shredder,

it doesn't end well.

So we're removing them at this point

just to make sure that we're properly recycling them

and that we don't have any problems downstream.

Right here we have what are called the mercury backlights,

these are coming out of the TVs

that we're breaking down on the line right here.

They contain some levels of mercury.

And obviously, we don't want those going through the shredder

or anything else too.

So we're packaging them to go to an improved downstream to recycle.

And now that we removed the focus materials,

we can go see what the shredder looks like.

So the first step that we have here, is called pre-process piles.

The first pile is printers, all we have in this pile is just printers.

So we're still on the first stage of the process.

But over here we have a second pile of commodity.

This is what we call our miscellaneous plastics based items

that are ready to be shredded.

So we're still on stage one.

But here we have our third commodity.

This is our low grade shred ready to go into the shredder as well.

So this is stage two of the process.

This is where the shredding is actually happening.

You can see right here, the material going up the entry

and straight into the shredder.

The material is going through the shredder,

and it's going through a magnet

that pulls out all ferrous metals,

run to stage three of the process, which is the sizing process.

[Steven speaking]

So we've reached the end of the process here.

We've gone from the beginning

receiving a truckload in, going through the triage process,

and from there diverting to the tech or to the recycling site.

So what's this?

So right here, we have a sample of finished commodities

that are ready to ship.

This right here is shredded plastic,

it's commodity grade and ready to ship to a downstream vendor.

What's this?

So over here, we have some shredded board, what is going to a refiner,

and I've got a sample here of a board that hasn't been shredded yet.

- This looks like gold. - Uh, it is gold.

What we're hoping to extract from these is gold, silver,

palladium, platinum, among other metals.

The goal here is that mining,

you get one ounce of gold for every ton of gold ore.

So our process is to try to recover as much as we can

- through a sustainable way. - I see.

- And then what's this? - Here we have non-ferrous metals.

Again, a commodity based grade

that's ready to ship downstream to a vendor.

Well, this has certainly been very interesting to learn about.

- Thank you. - I'm glad. Thank you.

All right, guys. Well, here we are, at the end of the line.

Darieth, I'm really happy that you had the opportunity to see

how material moves through our process.

Now we've got something that we're preparing for George as a gift

when I head down to Pittsburgh in a couple of weeks.

Well, he's gonna love that. And I hope to see you then too.

It's nice to meet you. I'll see you then.

Good to meet you. Thank you so much.

We have eight locations.

Our corporate headquarters here in Stow, Ohio

is our largest location.

But really, we have three locations

that represent the bulk of the troop,

and then we have some satellite operations.

But across the board collectively,

we're processing over 150 million pounds of electronics

on an annualized basis.

-Hey, Jim. -George, how are you? Good to see you.

-I'm doing great. Thanks for coming in. -Thanks for having me.

What do we have there?

Well, this is a gift from Regency Technologies.

And this is a an example of some of the recycled electronics

that we produce every single day in our facilities.

We've got circuit board and copper wire, aluminum,

hard drive caddies, all kinds of things

that you would see coming out of electronics.

We even have some gold here for you.

Some gold? That's a valuable box.

There's some gold in them there hills, Jim.

That's right. You could break plastic for the last $250.

Well, thanks for that. [laughing]

I was hoping you'd also share with me,

where is the future heading in the world of electronics recycling.

So one thing that we love about electronics recycling in particular

is that it's always changing.

There's always something new.

And as most people are probably aware, at this stage,

electronic vehicles are the hot topic.

And while it's not here yet, it's coming quick.

And we see ourselves positioned to participate

specifically in the electronics recycling of batteries.

Hmm. Well, I'll tell you, you guys have been recycling,

you know, a lot of components

that had batteries in them as well.

Basically this car of the future is a big battery

with the, you know, a computer attached to it, right?

Yes, a really big battery. And that's the difference.

So not a cell phone battery.

But think of a 2000 pound battery

that's made from lithium, cobalt and nickel and copper and lead.

And the name of the game is going to be to figure out

how to take these things apart

and use these materials that are very recyclable over and over again.

And we feel like we're the right guys for the job.

Well, you've been doing it for a while.

- I'm sure you guys will figure it out. - I sure hope so.

And on that note, George, I'm going to get going

because I want to get back to the plant and try to figure things out.

Sounds good. Thanks for coming.

Take care. Thank you.

[narrator] To learn more about the content in today's episode,

visit us online at www.tomorrowsworldtoday.com.