https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/americas-television-graveyards
Article is too long to copy here.
Article is too long to copy here.
Startups like Closed Loop Refining and Recycling aimed to capitalize on these problems, charging recycling centers every time they took in one of the 705 million CRTs sold in America after 1980, and warehousing them against the day they figured out how to safely dismantle them. After playing a years-long shell game with environmental regulators -- engaging in shenanigans like moving tubes from one warehouse to another to evade rules requiring waste to be disposed of within a year -- the company went bust, leaving warehouses full of super-toxic, lead-leaching e-waste that the taxpayers will have to deal with.
Closed Loop used off-the-books facilities to house the sets, leaving regulators and bankruptcy trustees with the challenge of simply knowing where the future problems will be.
It's not alone, either: other recyclers (or "recyclers") like Creative Recycling went through the same cycle, abandoning tons of toxic waste when they ran out of money.
It appears that the recyclers began in good faith, but quickly realized that they had been too optimistic in their projections of the costs of disassembling and disposing of old TVs.


