Recycler leaves football field-sized pile of abandoned monitors

What do you do when you've been undercharging for CRT monitor recycling and are stuck with a huge warehouse of monitors that cannot be processed profitably? How about just abandoning the entire thing and let taxpayers pick up the tab.

That's what happened near Fresno, Ca. when a recycling company discovered that their glass tube monitors weren't worth as much as they thought they were. According to the article:

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big, glassy funnels inside these machines — known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs — were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them and creating what industry experts call a “glass tsunami” as stockpiles of the useless material accumulate across the country.

“Lots of smaller recyclers are in over their heads, and the risk that they might abandon their stockpiles is very real,” said Jason Linnell of the Electronics Recycling Coordination Clearinghouse, an organization that represents state environmental regulators, electronics manufacturers and recyclers.