Here’s an unexpected success story: Best Buy’s e-waste recycling program—which is free for customers—is actually a profitable part of the business. Not massively so, but profitable nonetheless. Customers can drop off just about anything they want to recycle: computers, peripherals, TVs, mobile devices, even large household appliances, if you can truck them down to the nearest Best Buy. They’ll take your stuff off your hands and recycle it—at no cost. (When they had launched the program, they required the purchase of a BB gift card, a requirement they have since dropped.)
So how does Best Buy see a profit from this?
In two ways.
The first is that they get a cut of what their recycling partners can sell:
When truckloads of old TVs, PCs and dryers go to its processing partners, the plastic, gold, lead, nickel and other materials recovered from the dismantled waste is sold to be remade into new materials. And while volatile, the prices for all of these commodities have generally been heading up over the past few years, raising the share that comes back to Best Buy.
And the second is that electronics manufacturers pay Best Buy to comply with state laws regarding recycling:
“25 states have rules requiring that manufacturers recycle some share of what they sell every year,” Raudys said. “Our network can deliver efficiencies that [the electronics makers] can’t match, so they buy access to it.”
Best Buy has also been trimming the costs associated with the program, which helps.
When we think about e-waste recycling, the first thing that may come to mind is, “well, what are they doing with it?” After all, there have been some infamous stories of e-waste being shipped to Third World countries where it poses health and environmental hazards.
À la the paper industry, one solution is a certification program.
E-Stewards, founded by the Basel Acton Network (BAN) is
one such program that “recognizes electronics recyclers that adhere to the most stringent environmentally and socially responsible practices when recovering hazardous electronic materials.” E-Stewards is currently the only watchdog group that adheres to international standards regarding the transport of e-waste. An alternative to E-Stewards is the R2 code, which is less comprehensive than E-Stewards, and this easier to meet. (Earlier this year, BAN decided to incorporate the R2 Practices in the E-Stewards certification, although R2 Solutions
has denied that the R2 Practices are a “subset” of the E-Stewards.)
Anyway, of the three recycling partners that Best Buy uses, one is a full E-Stewards recycler, the other two are R2 recyclers. (As we have seen in the paper industry, no certification program is perfect, but it’s certainly a start.)
The sheer heft of the e-waste issue makes programs like Best Buy’s all the more necessary:
Since the program began, Raudys said, Best Buy has collected half-a-billion pounds of recycling, including both appliances and e-waste. And given that the volume of recycling is growing by 10-15 percent per year, Best Buy is likely to hit its goal of 1 billion pounds of consumer goods soon. Last year, some four million customers dropped off nearly 86-million pounds of electronics and 73-million pounds of appliances for recycling.
And that’s just what Best Buy collected.
We love our devices, but given that we generally have a “love ’em and leave ’em” approach to electronics, ditching them when a newer model appears, where we leave ’em needs to be more seriously addressed.
