E-Recycling Company Finds Inspiration in Dumped Monitors

John Martorano Jr.'s Pennsauken warehouse is a Stonehenge of the electronic age.

Columns of cathode-ray televisions flank baskets of computer motherboards, while microwaves stripped to their metal frames climb in plastic-wrapped stacks.

All around him are the broken down, the burned-out, the obsolete of the modern age—and all of them will find new life, in some form or another, saved from landfills by Martorano's recycling company, Magnum Computer Recycling, part of Thanks for Being Green LLC, which has grown from a van to a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Westville to this new, 26,000-square-foot facility in a mere seven years.

And it all started with a walk in the woods in Medford.

It was there Martorano, an Audubon resident, stumbled upon a cache of discarded computer monitors—at the time deemed hazardous waste—piled off to the side of the trail. It made him angry, but it also got him thinking.

“Someone chose to dump it in the woods instead of disposing of it properly,” he said. “That's when the light bulb went off—I started calling computer repair places and found out there was a need to take away their old hardware. From there, we haven't looked back.”

What began with that van eventually moved to a small facility in Westville before making the jump to Pennsauken, and now employs 14 people and covers half the state, geographically—Martorano's territory stretches from Burlington County down to the tip of Cape May, recycling 6.9 million pounds of junked electronics—everything from small appliances to refrigerators, from blown vacuums to networking switches.

“If it has an electrical cord, or has some kind of battery, I will recycle it,” Martorano said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest chunk of Magnum's recycling is old televisions. Five tractor-trailer loads' worth of them head out the door in a typical week, Martorano said, making up more than two-thirds of the weight of what he calls focus materials—the electronics that must be recycled under New Jersey law.

Because of the leaded glass in those old televisions, there's no way right now for Martorano to do anything but move them out to glass recyclers.

“That's the only item we do not touch,” he said.

Making sure those old TVs get to the right spot is part of Martorano's mission to do it the right way—his is one of just ten facilities in the state licensed by the Department of Environmental Protection to tear down old electronics, and he's one of just three south of Trenton to score an R2 certification, which mandates stringent health and safety standards and ensures e-waste isn't dumped on developing nations.

It also requires recyclers like Martorano to keep tabs on how things are handled after it leaves his back door, to make sure the nastier materials—cadmium, mercury, lead—don't end up dumped illegally or in ways that could do harm.

“It's all the stuff that's going to give you cancer and hurt Mother Earth,” he said, emphasizing the need to educate consumers about what's in the electronic junk that might otherwise get tossed in the trash.

“We're getting a stronger handle on what was actually going into the landfills,” Martorano said. “The amount of tonnage taken out of the landfills now...it's phenomenal.”

Holding his company to a higher standard—and striving for an even more stringent certification, e-Stewards, as his next goal—has proven to be a big advantage in the long-term, Martorano said, even though it might've dinged his profits at first. Now, instead of having companies send computers out with the old filing cabinets, they come to facilities like his, instead.

“The third-party certification, it's much more difficult...it's a decision I struggled with,” he said. “As more and more people were educated...my volume went up. It happened very quickly, I was surprised—it took maybe 18 months. The question used to be, 'What's the cost?'—now the question is, 'What certifications do you have?'”

Now, the only question is how much more he can grow—Martorano said he'd like to see Magnum cross over into Pennsylvania, but believes he can add around one million pounds a year from New Jersey over the next few years, potentially topping 10 million pounds annually in the near future.

“It just seems to never stop coming,” he said.

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Interested in recycling your old electronics? Magnum offers free dropoffs at its Pennsauken plant with an appointment—call 856-333-0991.