By Issie Lapowsky
Image: BlueOak
Sometimes, numbers say it all.
About 50 million tons of electronic waste were generated worldwide in 2012, according to a
United Nations
report. The same report predicted that number would grow to 65.4
million tons of e-waste by 2017. To put that in context, that’s about
200 Empire State Buildings or, for the more worldly, 11 Great Pyramids
of Giza.
While some of that waste—from old televisions to smartphones—is
refurbished and recycled, a troubling amount of it is shipped to
landfills around the world, where often it’s incinerated, leaching toxic
chemicals into the environment. In Guiyu, China, a now infamous dumping
ground for electronics,
studies have found startlingly high levels of lead in children’s bloodstreams.
But Priv Bradoo believes she can change things with the promise of gold and silver
Sometimes, no amount of sick kids and loaded landfills can convince
the world to change its dangerous behavior. But Priv Bradoo believes she
can change things with the promise of gold and silver. Bradoo is the
co-founder and CEO of BlueOak Resources, a Burlingame, California-based
startup that wants to help the country mine precious metals from its
stream of e-scraps. The hope is that we’ll soon see our e-waste as a
source of revenue, instead of letting it tumble into landfills.
As it turns out, a lot of the world’s e-waste is stuffed with
valuable metals like gold, silver, and copper. One ton of circuit boards
has anywhere from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold in it than one ton
of mined gold ore, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency.
In other words, the mining industry spends a fortune extracting these
metals from the ground. Corporations spend even more buying the
materials and molding them into a highly concentrated form. Then, after
all that, we dump them by the ton back into the ground like so many
chewed up wads of gum.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Bradoo says. And that’s why she and her
co-founder, Bryce Goodman, started BlueOak to focus on what they call
“above the ground recovery” of high-value materials. Yes, there’s
already a booming recycling and refurbishing industry worldwide, and in
places like Europe, Asia, and Canada, there are already large-scale
smelters who can extract these precious materials from e-scrap. But
Bradoo says there’s a gap in the system. Many of these smelters only
deal in mass quantities of scrap, she explains, meaning some smaller
collectors can’t even send their scrap abroad. Those who can, Bradoo
says, are effectively sending potential profits overseas. So, on
Tuesday, BlueOak is breaking ground on the first urban e-waste mining
refinery in the United States.
Turning Trash Into Treasure
Bradoo is not new to the waste recovery industry. Before launching
BlueOak, she was vice president of business development for LanzaTech, a
startup that turns toxic waste gasses from factories into high-value
fuel. She was working as a faculty adviser at Singularity University, an
educational organization for socially conscious tech entrepreneurs,
when she met Goodman, who was a student at Singularity. They bonded over
a shared interest in the concept of “upcycling,” or converting waste
into value, and in 2011, they launched BlueOak.
Image: Bryce Goodman and Priv Bradoo
By
building a refinery in the United States, BlueOak is launching a new
industry here, one that Bradoo hopes will encourage more American
consumers and corporations to think twice about tossing their used
electronics out with the trash. The first refinery in Osceola, Arkansas
is set to be completed by next year and will start off processing 15
million lbs of scrap per year and grow from there. BlueOak will partner
with collectors who gather used electronics primarily from corporations.
Those collectors separate the plastics and other materials from the
waste, and send BlueOak the parts that contain high value metals. The
company charges these collectors an upfront processing fee.
Then, after
the precious metals are extracted and sold, it returns the majority of
the profits to the collectors.
This model has attracted investor interest from the likes of Kleiner
Perkins Caulfield Byers, which participated in BlueOak’s seed round in
2011. More recently, the company raised another $35 million from the
Arkansas Teachers’ Retirement Fund and the Arkansas Development Finance
Authority to build the Osceola facility. “I liked the fact that it’s an
acute problem, and it has exponential growth potential to it,” says Amol
Deshpande, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. “All these devices and their
obsolescence creates an issue around waste toxicity that needs to be
addressed, and it can’t be addressed with landfills.”
‘A Wicked Problem’
Still, some experts argue that BlueOak, and indeed the rest of the
e-waste industry, may be overstating their potential for impact.
According to Josh Lepawsky, who has studied the e-waste problem as
associate professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
the vast majority of waste in the world actually comes from
manufacturing and production. Used materials, he estimates, make up
about 3 percent of the waste in the world. Used electronics are just a
fraction of that.
“It’s not that I don’t think what they’re doing might be positive,”
he says of BlueOak’s work, “but it’s going to be directed at that
roughly 3 percent of all waste and within that, an even smaller slice.
And yes, that slice is growing very quickly, but it’s still a thin
slice.” A better approach for BlueOak, he says, would be to collect the
waste that’s coming out of the manufacturing process, itself. “Anything
that moves material and energy recovery up the value chain prior to
purchase is going to have a much more substantial impact,” he says.
It’s an intractable issue, and Bradoo admits that what BlueOak is doing is only part of the solution.
Still, Lepawsky argues that to truly solve what he calls a “wicked
problem” like e-waste, there would need to be a massive reduction in the
volume of gadgets and devices that are currently being produced. “We
all know the waste hierarchy of reduce, reuse, recycle,” he says. “It’s
incredibly telling that almost all of our focus is spent on recycling
and nothing on reduction.”
Bradoo, for one, agrees that the glut of new products in the market
is the real culprit. Tech companies are under tremendous pressure from
Wall Street to roll out the “next big thing” every few months, and as a
result, the lifespan of the “last big thing” gets shorter by the day.
It’s an intractable issue, and Bradoo admits that what BlueOak is doing
is only part of the solution. “As long as you’ve got the companies
developing these devices and consumer behavior that propagates the
proliferation of devices, you’re going to see an exponential rise in
electronic waste,” she says. “We need to be thinking about how we want
technology to impact the world, not just in our utilitarian use, but at
the end of life, too.”
