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Chicago Electronics Recycler Faked Tear-Downs, Sent Hazardous Waste To Overseas Landfills (arstechnica.com)
Federals agents have accused Brian Brundage, the former owner of Chicago-based electronics recycling company Intercon Solutions and current owner of EnviroGreen Processing, of fraud for failing to properly break down and recycle electronic devices according to federal guidelines. Brundage allegedly shipped Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) from old computer and TV monitors, which contained "hazardous amounts of lead," and batteries to overseas landfills for disposal. The leftover electronics that weren't shipped overseas were destroyed inappropriately at his businesses or stored in warehouses, which is forbidden by federal guidelines. Ars Technica reports: According to the indictment (PDF), Brundage also improperly resold many of the electronics he acquired. Between 2009 and 2015, Brundage received shipments of calculators from an unnamed technology company in Texas with instructions to disassemble the calculators and recycle them accordingly. But Brundage apparently resold the calculators to another company based in Tampa, Florida, which purchased and sold used electronics. In exchange for the shipments of calculators, Brundage allegedly had the company in Tampa directly pay some of Brundage's personal expenses. Those expense include between $31,000 and $39,000 per year for a nanny and $26,000 to $42,000 per year for a housekeeper, as well as tens of thousands of dollars for jewelry expenses and payments to an Indiana-based casino. Among the more colorful accusations in the US government's indictment of Brundage: the businessman allegedly went to lengths to fool third-party auditors into giving his companies the certifications necessary to keep doing business as an e-recycler. Brundage allegedly invited unknowing customers on sham tours of Intercon's facility. Once there, he "directed Intercon's warehouse staff to set up a staged disassembly line to make it falsely appear as though Intercon regularly processed e-waste in a manner that was consistent with its public representations." The Chicago Tribune published a feature on Intercon in 2007. In it, Brundage is quoted saying, "We put old products on a disassembly line. We break each item down to raw materials and send them off to be smelted and reused." He added, "nothing that leaves here goes to a landfill."
Calculators from Texas, eh? Wonder if they were functional and hit the "grey market"...
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I HAVE NO IDEA TO WHOM THEY COULD BE REFERRING
Pay a small fine and get a CEO job somewhere else. The US has no shame any more. By the standards of the incoming government, this man is a shining example of capitalism at its finest.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
which had the county contract and recycled almost nothing but shipped it all away.
I haven't read this article yet, but I plan to and then dig some more. As someone working in sustainability (waste, water, GHG emissions, etc.) for a very, very large organization, I can't help but wonder if the orgs that were customers of Brundage will have any certifications they gained by using his recycling business revoked and if they will be fined for not meeting attainment goals retroactively.
Darn, I hope this didn't invalidate any of those carbon credits that I bought.
Indictment != conviction. Talk to me when this guy does hard time for poisoning the water supply of the kids in whichever hell hole got the electronics dumped there.
Anyone remember when that mining CEO got some actual jail time for ignoring safety regs and falsifying safety reports? The accidents weren't what made the news, the fact that we actually punished somebody for them did.
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if he had some European customers maybe (and he might have, since it'd be a great way to "launder" the goods, so to speak). But in the US if you hire a business to do a job and they kill a bunch of people in the process you're almost always blameless. You'd have to prove that a) they knew about it and b) they were actively seeking someone to break the law. Our Juries are mostly old white dudes (it's true, even if it makes folks uncomfortable to think about), especially on trials that can last a while like this. They tend to side with people and not the state prosecutors when it's other old white dudes.
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it's just that like folks tend to side with like folks. It's how people are, and there's plenty of studies to prove it. The defense just has to get enough of the right kind of people on the jury to keep from a conviction. And it's a lot easier when the defendant is a well to do white man. Pretending otherwise is silly.
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who receive your American electronic waste and scraps, are more honest than your American recycling companies and businesses. You really are a deprecit culture and society.
I thought that the Lead in a CRT was in the Lead Glass.
In which case it is as about as inert as is possible.
About the same as the vitrification of radioactive waste by sintering in glass.
That's how they do business... give you an ultra high quality sample run then over time switch to lead paint and lower quality materials etc. Everything is just a front that is put up until you sign the contract.
Oh wait .... he's not Chinese?
The Trump administration will remove all those regulations that are BAD for business. Recycling regulations are BAD for the American economy. We can't compete with CHINA with this situation. Luckily, Trump has assembled the right team to bring business ethics into the EPA, and get rid of the tree-hugger communist snowflake morals. America will be great again (as long as you don't happen to leave close to a toxic landfill, but none of Trump's billionaire friends do).
The entire indictment has less than 3k in e-waste fraud issues, the majority of the > 600k income was unreported and trying to expense a 35k trip to the casino.
I doubt it.
The U.S. has been outsourcing pollution to China, India and other countries for decades.
Tell me that Apple, H.P., Dell and the rest could get away with the pollution their products cause in China (for example) in the U.S.
The CEOs are rated on profit and when they can maximize profit in polluting countries, those cretins get their rewards.
Nothing new here.
Federals Agents Spells Dooms Fors Brians Brundages?
Federals agents
Jesus Christs, Slashdots, yous can'ts evens gets the firsts words rights. Yous sounds likes this guys:
https://theinfosphere.org/imag...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
FTFY,though.
Next time I see "white liberals" written on a wall in shit, I'll know you've been in the area.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Or even a greenie? Or is this just you insisting that the ONLY bad people are those who don't agree with you or have a different political outlook?
And people wonder why Trump won. Retards like the above did it. Not liberals, hell, not even kicking out Bernie. It was the morons like the above who insist that any errors or crimes MUST be for the other side to do, because their side is just amazing.
Guidelines are not rules. They are guidelines. They are suggestions about how to go about doing things.
And you wonder why some of us are climate change sceptics.
It's shenanigans like this that make us wonder what we don't know (or hasn't been discovered/revealed yet, like the Clinton emails) is going on behind the scenes.
I still don't understand why I must PAY to have my recycling bin emptied when the city grants a nice monopoly and they can sell all that metal & glass at a tidy profit.
Ok, sure city granted monopolies end up costing more than just having the city or county government do the job. But try to explain that to a public that has been raised on propaganda saying that is impossible. Facts do not work. I've seen it happen.
Recycling is not profitable. 1st you have to FORCE people because if given the choice they will not bother. Just like we have to FORCE people to buy trash service so the cheap bastards don't dump trash in our public parks etc. AFTER you have a forced customer base, then you can FORCE a profit in addition to whatever scheme to squeeze out more profits unethically and/or illegally (aka efficiency.)
Our paper recycling is losing us money. Because we pay more so we don't have to sort our recycling, the paper is now too dirty for the Chinese to buy it. Yes, our paper was shipped all the way to China to be recycled! How can that be profitable even when they used to accept it? Only some recycling pays and it fluctuates the rest is done at a loss. The private biz hides the up/down and where to details with no accountability. The gov operation looked bad because we could see the process. Recycling is a dirty business... unless we change our products to be aware of their full lifecycle it will remain this way.
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... will not reduces ("but, but, the free-market will solve everything!": in your dreams!)
In some places, old landfills are being reprocessed. What that means is whatever is buried there now has enough value to make it worthwhile to dig up and recycle. If engineered correctly, landfills are safe places to "store" our waste. In my view, a landfill is an investment in the future. From leachate to precious metals, all have a value. That value may not currently be enough to make reprocessing attractive but in the future it certainly will be.
Organized Crime has long infiltrated the Waste Management industry. This is hardly news; when it comes to recycling (where companies are paid to dispose of whatever) it seems obvious that you can collect the cash and dispose of nothing = profit, especially since the fees are set up in the first place to guarantee profits if you actually do dispose of the waste properly.
The "Mob" has been caught disposing of Dioxins by putting a quart here, a quart there, in tankers of gasoline, which is then distributed to stations across a region (NorthEast US, Montreal, etc) so that your wife and daughter can pump them into their subcompacts and burn it away, obviously being exposed to a Cancer risk while doing so. What makes anyone think a little lead from a CRT is going to give them pause?