All language subtitles for Tomorrows.World.Today.S04E01.Electronics.Recycling.720p.WEBRip.x264-KOMPOST_track3_[eng]

[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.