https://resource-recycling.com/pdfs/Ingenthron0316e.pdfInteresting article with a lot of points I wasn't aware of.
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, among other things, has a term "speculative accumulation", which applies to "hoarding wastes with no plan to actually recycle them". So it says you must use 75% of any material collected for recycling within a year. Apparently this started because tire folks tended to burn their tire piles, retreads, etc when the cost of the refining exceeds the value of the end material. But in the process, we basically outlawed recycling CRTs. Hence why no one without government subsidies collects CRTs for free anymore. Previously, you could take out the leaded glass, grid it up and feed it to smelting furnaces as flux agents.
Previously, they indeed used to grind up CRT glass and feed it to the smelters. This saved time and money as you didn't have to dig up new lead and silica. Much better for the environment. But not only the RCRA nor how the EPA was the most instrumental in this change. The worry of environmental activists 'snooping around' correctly concerned smelting companies enough to get mine for new lead and silica (usually overseas) even if it was more expensive. Safety and reliability from hippies and government bureaucrats trumped environmental concerns.
If you dig lead out of the ground in China (pretty toxic) and ship it across the world (more energy wasted in transportation), you have exactly zero worry of getting the EPA or hippies breathing down your neck. Use recycled material and you do.
Thought it was an interesting form of government incompetence, hippies hurting the environment by being stupid and the manufacturing equivalent of defensive medicine.
