Recovery of metals from electronic waste recycling is providing an increasingly important supply of scrap metals to smelters, ranging from base metals to steel, according to the CEO of a major player in a recent interview with Platts.

John Shegerian, chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International, explained that his company began shipping copper scrap, recovered from electronic waste, to South Korean copper smelter LS-Nikko last December. LSNikko is a joint venture between South Korean consumer electronics giant LS Electronics, and Japan’s Nikko, a maker of rechargeable electric vehicles.

ERI also ships gold, silver and palladium, recovered from its recycling efforts.

“Companies like LS-Nikko are anxious to obtain raw materials and they recognize that metals recovered from ecycling are an important source,” said Shegerian.

ERI ships material to LS-Nikko under a contract signed on December 16 last year. As part of the agreement, LS-Nikko has also taken a small, undisclosed, equity stake in ERI.

ERI operates electronic recycling operations in seven locations in the US: Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington; and two sites in Fresno, California.

According to figures provided by Shegerian, the company recovers a monthly average of 380,057 lb of high-grade copper (172 mt) and 232,407 lb of aluminum from all of its recycling centers. On the ferrous side, its recycling centers recover 1.9 million lb (875.26 mt) of carbon steel on average, each month. It does this by processing an average of 10 million lb of electronic waste. It also recovers a monthly average of around 15,000 lb of stainless steel.

In addition, it recovers significant amounts of precious metals. Shegerian said that typical shipments to LS-Nikko in South Korea can contain as much as 107 g of high-grade gold, 417 g of silver and 18 g of palladium. Additionally, it recovers precious metals in less pure forms.

Most of the material that ERI recovers in recycling now goes to LS-Nikko, including all of the copper.

Shegerian said that the LS-Nikko investment in ERI would enable it to expand its recycling operations to between 10 and 12 locations across the US over the next two years.

“We’re only here in the United States so far, but there’s no reason why we can’t expand beyond our borders, internationally,” he said.

In addition to running a recycling company, Shegerian describes himself on his own web site as a “social and green tech ecopreneur.” Keen to display his green credentials, his business attire is a sharp suit, a clean, white shirt and his trademark green tie. In an effort to save paper, his business card is about a third of the size of a standard business card size.

Shegerian has had a varied career, from student finance to various web site entrepreneurial and social networking projects. He was a co-founder of FinancialAid.com, a major provider of student loans in the US, which was sold to Education Lending Group for $400 million in February 2005.

Despite the fact that 20 states in the US have passed legislation mandating recycling, large amounts of electronic waste still end up on landfills. “Even material which is sent for recycling ends up on landfills and it sometimes gets exported to developing countries and still ends up in landfills,” said Shegerian. “Apart from the environmental impact of this, as we’ve seen, by putting this stuff in the landfill, there are thousands of tons of commodities that are just being tossed out.”

The US is not a signatory of the Basel Convention that bans the dumping of electronic waste in developing countries. Earlier this year, however, a shipment of old TV tubes from the US was rejected by Indonesia and sent back to Boston. According to a report in the Boston Globe newspaper in March, the US Government Accountability Office described the country’s regulations on electronic waste recycling as “among the weakest in the world,” allowing a “virtually unrestricted” flow of old TVs and computers to developing countries.

“Electronic waste has large amounts of rare and precious metals that are becoming increasingly harder and expensive to replace with virgin units,” Shegerian said. “Recession aside, demand for metals is outstripping the supply of virgin units. We are the new urban miners at a lower cost,” he added.

In the US, all of the states that mandate electronic waste recycling, except California, use the so-called “producer responsibility” approach, where the manufacturers pay for the cost of recycling.

But the US still has a large potential for recycling. “In the US, the per capita production of garbage is nearly 5 lb a day,” Shegerian noted, “and most of that can be recycled.”