2 Former E-Cycling Executives Get 28 Months for E-Waste Wire Fraud Scheme
Two former top executives of Total Reclaim, billed as the Northwest’s largest e-waste recycler, were sentenced Tuesday to 28 months for wire-fraud conspiracy in connection with the illegal export of 8.3 million pounds of junked LCD TVs to Hong Kong…
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between 2008 and 2015, said the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle. Craig Lorch, 61, and Jeff Zirkle, 55, earned millions by promising to recycle the e-waste responsibly, but secretly shipped it overseas where it was destroyed in an “environmentally unsafe” manner, it said. “Motivated by greed, these defendants betrayed every pledge they made to be good environmental stewards,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman. The green group Basel Action Network tipped off authorities to the scheme after electronically tracking the e-waste to Hong Kong, said the office. After BAN confronted Lorch and Zirkle with its findings, they tried to “cover up their fraud by altering hundreds of shipping records,” it alleged. Attempts to reach the defendants’ lawyers were unsuccessful. BAN Director Jim Puckett has "no doubt that 7 years of shipping hundreds of container loads of mercury laden LCD screens to Hong Kong caused serious damage to the health and livelihood of the workers employed there," he emailed us Wednesday. "I have seen these smashing operations and they provide no protections from breathing this very toxic metal. Those victims will sadly never see justice for the harm done to them.” The group was able to uncover Total Reclaim's crimes using GPS-based geolocation devices it developed with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to track e-waste container waste movement inside the U.S. and as the containers leave U.S. ports, said a 2016 BAN report.