November 16, 2018

The owners and CEOs of the largest e-waste recycling company in Washington State have pled guilty and agreed to pay $1.1 million for lying to the public and to public agencies about recycling electronics in an environmentally safe manner. As the largest participant in the state’s “E-Cycle Washington” program, Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle‘s company, Total Reclaim, was paid millions of dollars by customers like the City of Seattle to properly handle and dispose of millions of pounds of mercury-containing e-waste. However, through tracking devices hidden in surrendered products, local nonprofit Basel Action Network found that Total Reclaim was in fact secretly shipping their e-waste to Hong Kong, where they were dismantled without any sort of safety precautions. USAO WDWA

Tagged in: Contract Non-Compliance,