In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?
n the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter , so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled.
Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief operating officer of ERI, arrives wearing the corporate uniform of a tech executive: navy hoodie and jeans. “You’ll need these,” he says, handing me a pair of bright orange earplugs. Blum and a friend started ERI back in 2002, after leaving college. California had just banned electronics from landfills due to hazardous chemical contents – but little recycling infrastructure existed. “I didn’t know anything about electronics. I was a business major,” Blum says.
Scrap recycling contains so many different materials that the industry has developed its own shorthand: light copper is “Dream”, No 1 copper wire is “Barley”, insulated aluminium wire is “Twang”. There’s no such poetry here, however. Instead, the extracted pieces are thrown into boxes scrawled with things like Copper and CAT-5 wiring. Inside one I notice a coil of LED Christmas lights. “During the holidays we get a ton of these. This is all copper, in the wire,” Blum says, grabbing a handful.
Farther along the line, the conveyor splits off into tributaries. A robot arm whirrs above one, picking up parts. “We used to have 15 pickers on this line. Now we have two or three,” Blum says. The company spent a lot of money training the robot, which picks far faster than any human could and is now 97% accurate. Blum seems to prefer it to people. “It comes to work every day and never got Covid,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s joking.
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