Best Buy to Roll Out New Recycling Kiosks Next Week

Best Buy will start rolling out new recycling kiosks at its U.S. stores next week that will be easier for customers to use than the current ones, Leo Raudys, senior director of environmental affairs at the retailer, told us Thursday. About 33 percent of Best Buy’s new locations this year will get the new kiosks, which will be located at the front of the stores, and additional stores will get them in 2011, he said.

"It’s going to take a while,” but the hope is that the new kiosk will be in place at all U.S. Best Buy stores “within a couple of years,” Raudys said. “We'll start with new stores,” but in some cases, where the kiosks are “relatively new, you don’t want to just tear them out,” he said.

Customers will be able to drop slightly larger products, including remote controls, into the new kiosks for free recycling than have been possible with the current kiosks, Raudys said. The current kiosks can only handle small items including ink cartridges, CDs, DVDs and mobile phones. Consumers will still have to bring larger products, including those with monitors, to the retailer’s customer service desks, Raudys said. Best Buy charges $10 in most cases to trade in those items, but gives customers $10 gift cards in return. Although iPods would fit into the kiosks, Raudys said the retailer prefers to only accept those at its service counters due to unspecified “data issues."

Best Buy would like to see “a national solution” for tackling e-waste, said Raudys, an environmental regulator for Minnesota 1990-2008 before joining the company. As it is, “about half of the states have state recycling laws, which we can manage, but it gets increasingly difficult just because it’s kind of a patchwork quilt,” he said. He declined to comment on how far along Best Buy was in developing a compliance plan before CEA and the Information Technology Industry Council sued New York City last year to stop the city’s e-waste program from taking effect. “Generally speaking” there are similar laws “in about half of the U.S. states and we do have some compliance obligations,” he said. The regulations are mostly “fairly easy for us to comply with,” and Best Buy’s collection program goes “far and above” what would be required under the regulations, he said.

The retailer initiated its in-store take-back program in February 2009, and “it’s grown very fast,” Raudys said. It “collected over 60 million pounds of CE just in the first year,” he said. That’s “a big number, but it’s pretty small when you consider the overall CE waste stream,” he said. Industry experts estimate that 4 billion-6 billion pounds of e-waste are generated each year in the U.S. and less than 1 billion pounds of that gets recycled, he said. “We're aiming to recycle a billion pounds of CE as well as appliances. … We think it’s going to take us about four to five” years to reach that goal, he said. Raudys predicted about 66 percent of the products taken in will be CE and the rest will be appliances. “Right now our mix is about half” CE and half appliances, he told us, saying the retailer took in 60 million pounds of appliances in the first year of its program on top of the 60 million pounds of CE.

Best Buy will “pretty much will take back just about any consumer electronics, regardless of whether somebody bought it from us or not,” said Raudys. It decided to accept products purchased at any retailer instead of just from Best Buy mainly because “our customers want it,” he said. “If you think about it, if you've got an old VCR, a DVD [player], a Walkman, whatever sitting around your basement … you're not going to remember where you bought it necessarily.” The goal was to “make recycling easy; we think it’s the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do, and it’s something we can do fairly easily for our customers,” he said.

Among the few products that Best Buy still won’t take back are air conditioners and microwaves because “they're too difficult for us to manage in the store,” Raudys said. Air conditioners “are pretty big and heavy,” in particular, he said, but “I can see us maybe doing it in the future.” The company takes flat-panel TVs up to 60 inches, and other monitors and tube TVs up to 32 inches. About 50 percent of the products in the program have been TVs and 30 percent computer monitors, with products including MP3 players and videogame consoles making up the rest, Raudys said.

Best Buy has run the program at “breakeven” so far, “which is not easy to do,” said Raudys, adding the retailer wasn’t sure it would be able to achieve that in year one. Retailers tend to be “really good about getting stuff out the front door, not out the back door, so we had to figure out how to do this pretty efficiently.” It has a logistics provider -- a transportation company -- that takes the products out of the stores and delivers them to one of the five recycling companies Best Buy does business with, he said. Electronic Recyclers International handles about 50 percent of the material, with the rest split between Regency Recycling, MPL, E-Structors and Quicksilver Recycling, he said. Best Buy holds the recycling companies to “fairly aggressive standards” in its contracts, he said. For example, it doesn’t permit recyclers to export “non-working” products for recycling outside the U.S. The vast majority of material that gets taken in via the program -- “in the high-90s” [percent] -- gets recycled, Raudys said. Plastic, gold, aluminum and other material “has value in the commodities market,” he said. About 1 percent of products taken in can be recycled and used again almost as-is, with a small amount of refurbishment, but the recyclers handle that and give Best Buy a percentage of the revenue, he said. A very small amount of material can’t be recycled at all, including wood from old console TVs, he said. “There’s really nothing you can do with that. Depending on what local laws are in place, it’s either going to get land-filled or burned."

Best Buy said in March that it disagreed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which it’s a member of, on climate change issues. The retailer said it was “supportive of comprehensive climate change legislation and working to move toward a low carbon economy.” The Chamber of Commerce, however, has questioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions regulations, and has said it “will work to discourage ill-conceived climate change policies and measures that could severely damage the security and economy of the United States.” Best Buy issued its statement because some people were “asking us what we thought about the issue” and it wanted “to clarify where we're at,” Raudys said. The retailer believes “it’s important to have a good, clear policy,” he said.