E-waste industry leaders ECS Refining: clean, efficient, domestic

Recently I wrote a piece for the Berkeley Engineer alumni mag on a subject I've rarely covered over the last decade or so: e-waste. The subject of the story was ostensibly engineering alum Glen Langstaff, but effectively it was the broader field of e-waste recycling, with ECS Refining, the Stockton-based firm where Langstaff serves as manager and vice president of operations, in the spotlight. ECS takes all of UC Berkeley's e-waste, and that of many other institutions, organizations, and corporations, processing 50,000 tons of material annually at its state-of-the-art flagship Stockton facility alone. Nothing is scrapped, and nothing is shipped overseas. Technology and efficiency are key to the company's success in Stockton, and it plans to not only continue pushing the envelope there (through the addition of self-learning, collaborative robots) but also export that model to its other plants nationwide and facilitate the spread of its model to other companies, with the ultimate goal of 100 percent recycling of all US-generated e-waste. Read the full story here.