This morning I had to announce layoffs for 5-8 staff at Good Point Recycling in Middlebury Vermont. These will only affect Vermont employees, our Brockton MA facility, which does 95% of the recycling (not reuse) for our company is unaffected. Good Point has been threatened denial of payment and threat of environmental enforcement by Vermont's Agency of Natural Resources. The "crime" is removing T-con boards for reuse, and hard drives for recycling and data security, at a change of address (down the street) which we notified ANR of 6 months ago after our landlord declined to give us an extended lease.
We informed ANR in July that we were moving the removal of TV boards, to test for reuse and resale, to a different building. We showed that we sell approximately $50k per month to USA repair shops - individually tested and inventoried circuit boards for $30 each. ANR said then that we had to change the address on the recycling insurance policy - which lists no address and covers pollution anywhere it's released. ANR said we must change the address on the bank financial mechanism - at a cost of $1500 - despite the fact it lists NO ADDRESS and covers recycling tonnage anywhere we might abandon it. Despite these two crystal clear evidence of incompetence or bias by the ANR staffer, the Secretary and administration has taken no action except to send another ANR staffer to inspect us in October. He said he saw zero evidence of any environmental violation under RCRA, and said that the administration of our recycling contract might be her issue (how she withholds funds).
That contract does say we must be R2 certified. We explained the move during our R2 audit and the auditor and SERI told us that so long as all the same downstreams and management systems were in place, that the change of address would be done at the anniversary of the next audit. If R2 does disqualify the same person from reusing the same TV circuit board, removed solely for the purpose of reuse, and the Vermont state statute clearly says that a device removed solely for the purpose of reuse is NOT recycling and is NOT governed by the statute, then R2 would be messed up.
None of our competitors in the ITAD and hard drive destruction business - or Vermont's own Surplus Property office - is required to have any of these insurance or certifications. Karen explained that is because the "purpose" of the drive removal is for "data reasons" and when our staff do the exact same action, it is for "recycling" reasons.
Hey, Governor Phil Scott, cleanup in Aisle 9.
I waited 6 months to do the layoffs because my history shows that Vermont ANR does not take admitting error lightly. When we enjoined them from cancelling our contract in 2013, they wrote letters to all of our OEM clients implying we were guilty of violating environmental laws (there was no such claim)... that was the last time I had to lay off 50% of Good Point's staff until ANR settled and returned the contract to us in 2014.
For even more background - Prior to the 2013 RFP rebid, Vermont ANR staff invited Good Point to a meeting at their offices in Barre Vermont to tell us a) they were going back to bid rather than extend our contract, and b) that the "purpose of the rebid was to replace you", and c) that if we were the low bidder, that they intended to use technical scores to offset our low bid. This was shocking, and I told them I believed they had just committed a felony, but that we would start the process of drafting an "Opt Out Plan" for electronics manufacturers to contract us directly.
What happened that year? We were both the low bidder AND to - apparently to avoid the felony - ANR actually awarded us the highest technical score... but the staff mysteriously said the negotiations were "taking too long" and then announced new OEM rules for opt out plans AFTER the submission deadline. This led to a lot of press, especially at VTDigger (Hillary Niles), and a freedom of information request by your humble author... which revealed that the new second place bidder XXXX was not only lower scoring, but was using a non-R2 recycling company - specifically dened in the RFP. And the Agency of Natural Resources also guaranteed the XXXX vendor a cash guarantee of $720,000 if our OEM Opt Out Plan was approved. That was using OEM money to pay the recycler to guarantee the OEMs would not have a choice of programs.
We sued, got an injunction, ANR appealed, and then we settled for approval of the Opt Out plan and guarantee that the RFP would be reissued at the end of the year. Governor Peter Schumlin had to overrule the ANR Secretary to make the settlement go through, and we managed to make it through 2014 and won the next contract, which we've kept for the next 9 years.
Schumlin chose not to run again (and I have some tidbits on that)... but the new Phil Scott administration replaced the ANR Secretary, and we've had pleasant interactions with Secretary Julie Moore since. But one of the 2013 regulators - one who was behind the 2013 "plan" to "replace" Good Point Recycling - one who approved the non-R2 recycling company (explaining that because their CRTs - though not the PCs or laptops - went to Kuusakoski, that R2 was unnecessary... Kuusakoski it turned out was either landfilling that CRT glass against the RFP instructions, or worse, the glass became part of the largest CRT dumping settlement in Ohio, for 46 million pounds of CRT glass, for which Kuusakoski had to pay over $6M). Good Point stopped using that market in 2013, during the lawsuit, when we discovered they were accepting shredded glass and had not met the "speculative accumulation" deadlines for EPA... in fact we ended it despite me being without salary during the lawsuit against ANR).
This is important background because this month Good Point Recycling has been ordered to close operations which, while not vital to the Program, will eliminate 8 jobs, including our program with the Americans with Disabilities Act / Counseling Services of Addison County which gives full time paid employment to differently abled staff. Addison County Vermont, by the way, has the highest percentage of clients placed in earning jobs in the state, and I serve as Governor Phil Scott's business ambassador and voting member of the Vermont State Rehabilitation Council, which oversees all of the rehabilitation job programs in the state.
The Grinch Who Stole Jobs at Christmas
The reason? The woman at ANR who approved the non-certified recycler who replaced us for 2013-14 contract, says that a company move down the street in Middlebury disqualifies us from serving as the recycler. She gave the following reasons.
1) That our pollution liability coverage needs to have the address changed.
This is absurd. There's no address on the current policy. Otherwise we could spill electronics along the road and not be covered. THERE IS NO ADDRESS TO CHANGE.
2) That our Irrevocable Line of Credit from the bank - the financial instrument for our Closure Plan - has to be rewritten with the new address.
This is absurd. There's no address on the current policy except for the Beneficiary - ANR - and the mailing office address for Good Point which has not changed. THERE IS NO ADDRESS TO CHANGE.
3) That our 2022 R2 Certification is null and void because it doesn't list the new address.
This too is absurd for two reasons.
First, it's absurd because she explained in 2013 that the recycler didn't need to be R2 certified if the CRTs weren't being recycled by them. We don't recycle the CRTs in Vermont either. In fact the ONLY disassembly we do is of the top working parts from about 10% of LED TVs - solely for the purpose of reusing them. This is where MOST of our rehab challenged staff work.
...And they remove hard drives, which she says does not require a Closure Plan or R2 certification at SecureShred, ShredEx, or Vermont Surplus property offices "for data reasons", while Good Point "is doing it for the purpose of recycling". I'm not kidding. This is in writing. This is like saying a restaurant can cook meat because it's for consumption, but a cook cannot cook meat because it's his job.
The second reason it's absurd is that we notified our R2 Auditor of the move during the 2022 annual audit and got instructions for processes to maintain when the 2023 audit takes place at the new address. The nonprofit which runs the Responsible Recycling standard also told us that so long as the same employees, same management system, same ISO processes, same trained employees, same downstream markets, same processes, same equipment is in place, and its ONLY an address change, that we don't have to do a second audit (which costs us about $20,000 annually) in the same year.
So we are still listed as a certified recycler on the website of the organization that maintains the standard for the 2022 audit, but the ANR staff has told us to close what SHE defines to be "recycling" operations - the removal of parts solely for the purpose of reuse. Which ANR's own statute says that devices solely collected for reuse and repair are "not recycling", which is why we set that up in the new facility (we moved all of the other recycling activity to our facility in Massachusetts in 2019).
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