Just past the visitor’s center is a mountain of garbage. Refrigerators, desk chairs and shopping carts, stacked in a hulking heap.
Around the corner, past the “tipping floor”where compactors shovel steaming waste into piles bound for the landfill, is where old gadgets go to rest.
That is, before they’re repurposed.
About 775 tons of trash arrive at Alachua County’s Leveda Brown Environmental Park & Transfer Station every day. Like other waste facilities across the country, it’s seen more electronics pass through its doors in recent years than ever before.
Electronic waste, including discarded phones and laptops, is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. The U.S. does not impose federal regulations on e-waste disposal, relying instead on a patchwork of state laws. Florida is among the states where collection and processing decisions are left to local authorities.
The Leveda site is one of several Alachua County drop-off locations that accept hazardous waste, including batteries, paint, and spent electronics. Transfer stations consolidate and sift through trash before it’s transported. They also act as intermediaries between households and businesses with waste to dump and the companies that process and profit from it.
Electronics contain valuable materials, including copper, steel, aluminum and precious metals, which can be recovered and sold on the commodities market.
Although Alachua County isn’t cashing in — commodities exchange helps offset facility operating costs — materials recovery is a growing business. The global precious metals e-waste recovery market is projected to reach $8.75 billion by 2030, according to data from Grand View Research, a research and consulting firm.
Economic incentives are now converging with growing awareness of the risks posed by e-waste, driving action and innovation across Florida — and breathing new life into old tech.
The gadgets graveyard
Most of the trash Americans generate ends up in domestic landfills or incinerators. Historically, much of their recycling met the same fate abroad, primarily in developing nations where the scrap trade is a critical economic engine.
Strict import bans on foreign waste have shifted the bulk of the burden back onto waste producers. But disposed electronics continue to circumvent the rules, making their way by the shipload to parts of the world willing to accept them.
Shipping containers ferrying e-waste often carry a mix of working and non-working devices, said Richard Grant, a professor at the University of Miami who has spent years studying the e-waste market in Accra, Ghana. That helps non-functional devices, which are host to toxic materials such as lead and mercury, slip through customs.
A report late last year documented a “hidden tsunami” of e-waste entering countries, including destinations in Southeast Asia, unprepared to safely handle it. A group of 10 U.S. companies, according to the report, was involved in exporting more than 10,000 shipping containers of potential e-waste to those countries between January 2023 and February 2025.
A new international standard requires written consent from a waste-importing country before it can receive another’s electronic refuse. Jurisdictions along the shipping route must also provide consent.
But the rule, part of a United Nations treaty, lacks a strong enforcement mechanism, potentially undermining its objectives, according to Grant.
Governments’ own laws can clash with those of the international community. And not every country may agree on what constitutes e-waste.
“I think we’re a long way off from developing a coherent policy,” Grant said.
E-waste shipped overseas is typically sent to informal scrap yards, where workers grind the electronics into dust and use magnets to extract valuable metals. Materials of little resale value, including plastic and glass, are frequently burned, releasing toxic fumes harmful to humans and the environment.
Environmentalists have pressed electronics manufacturers to be more involved in curbing the illegal e-waste trade, calling for greater producer responsibility and stricter supply chain tracking. Companies such as Apple and Dell have announced measures aligned with those demands, but with limited effect, Grant said.
“I mean, I often say to my students, you go to an Apple store, and it’s all about the experience, and it feels good and it looks nice,” Grant said. “But no one ever thinks, ‘well, what’s going to happen to this computer when it dies?’”
In Gainesville, it might end up with folks like Joshua Prouty, who oversees Alachua County’s household hazardous waste collection. Prouty manages end-of-life devices, ranging from laptops and printers to LED lights and electronic cigarettes, otherwise known as vapes.
Proper disposal of vapes — and other items containing lithium-ion batteries — was the subject of a recent county-led information campaign following a fire at the Leveda site last Labor Day weekend. Prouty said it’s likely a compactor crushed the battery in a discarded vape or similar device, triggering the blaze.
Not long after, the county’s waste hauler discontinued curbside pickup of large electronics and directed residents to bring those items to designated drop-off sites. Prouty said the timing was coincidental and that the hauler was only picking up e-waste as a courtesy, as its contract did not cover the service.
Vapes are cumbersome to process, Prouty said. He and his team must break each device apart to remove the nicotine cartridges from their plastic shells — a process he likens to shucking oysters — before extracting the batteries.
Ease of disassembly is a critical component of e-waste recycling and materials recovery. That’s because the data stored on recycled devices should be removed before processing to ensure privacy.
Under the Florida Information Protection Act, businesses and government entities across the state are expected to be good stewards of electronic records containing residents’ personal information and to ensure their secure disposal.
To ensure compliance with the Florida Information Protection Act, Alachua County works only with certified recyclers. Prouty receives reports from each truckload that leaves his facility, documenting the devices whose data the contractor has shredded.
“We’re responsible for cradle-to-grave recycling,” he said.
Identifying risk
Used electronics aren’t just a nuisance lurking in people’s junk drawers; they harbor hazardous compounds.
Consumer and industrial electronics contain synthetic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These substances, designed to repel heat, water, oil and stains, are not easily degradable, lending them the nickname “forever chemicals.”
Improperly handled, heavy metals, including lead and mercury as well as PFAS, can leach from e-waste into soil and water. Devices that end up in landfills are often crushed, producing dust that can carry PFAS.
That’s especially dangerous for those on the front lines, said Joshua Ocheje, a graduate student at Florida International University studying PFAS contamination in e-waste and biosolids. Waste management staff are at risk of direct exposure to PFAS.
And when it rains, local communities are also vulnerable. PFAS can seep from landfill soil into nearby bodies of water, endangering water quality. A growing body of research suggests that extended PFAS exposure can contribute to developmental effects or delays in children, as well as an increased risk of some cancers and reproductive complications.
There are plenty of remediation technologies capable of removing PFAS from water, but due to expense and other hurdles, governments aren’t deploying them at scale, Ocheje said. Meaningful action hinges on a willingness to take risks seriously, and to invest in solutions, he added.
Many of those solutions come from state-supported research, including an ongoing project at the University of Central Florida designed to intercept contaminants in recycling before they enter the waste stream.
UCF researchers are piloting a hazardous waste detection tool to increase Florida’s recycling efficiency. Their image-recognition system, a machine-learning model trained on pictures of waste and open-source datasets, will flag contaminants in curbside bins and at waste-transfer stations.
The long-term plan is to embed the model into a mobile app for Florida residents and to install fixed-camera versions of the system at waste facilities. Households will scan their trash for contaminants before pickup, and waste management will do the same with their on-site technology before processing.
The tool is specifically designed to evaluate recycling contamination but draws on established AI methods and model families, according to Kyungwon Park, a UCF postdoctoral researcher involved in the project. More testing and validation of the model are needed before app launch, he added.
One of the team’s stated objectives is to support habit formation, part of the reason for the system’s simple design. At the household level, users take photos of their trash, and the app issues an “accept” or “reject” message, pinpointing items unfit for recycling under local guidelines.
“Contamination is often caused by confusion,” Park wrote in an email. “This tool supports both behavior change and future automation efforts.”
Safe e-waste management also depends on community education, especially now as more gadgets enter the waste stream at a more rapid clip, said Gus Olmos, director of solid waste & resource recovery for Alachua County. Olmos said the county is processing less e-waste by weight but more by volume.
“All the electronics are becoming smaller and smaller, but there’s just more of them,” he said.
That’s Randy Huffman’s dilemma. The 71-year-old retired Gainesville resident said he keeps a bin overflowing with old devices, some of which are still functional, that he no longer uses.
Huffman said he knows he shouldn’t throw his phones and tablets in the trash, but isn’t sure where to take them. Neither, he suspects, do his peers.
“I’m over 55, and I live in an over-55 community,” Huffman said. “I’m sure a lot of these people here have old stuff, electronics that they don’t know what to do with.”
More than 3 in 10 American adults hang on to old tech because they’re unsure what to do with it, according to surveys from CNET, a technology-focused media company. Nearly 1 in 5 throw their devices away, while about 25% opt to sell them.
Resold devices often travel through online marketplaces and retail buyback programs. But things are shifting.
A new crop of recyclers, in Florida and elsewhere, is seeking to mine junked devices for bits of treasure.
Trash to cash
The electronics business depends on rare-earth elements, a group of metals found in the Earth’s crust. Rare-earth elements are actually quite abundant — just not in high concentrations.
About 90% of the world’s rare earths are refined in China, leaving the resilience of the world’s technology industry at the country’s mercy.
China in 2023 tightened its grip on the materials, citing national security concerns. It further cracked down on their export last year as tensions escalated between Beijing and the U.S. following President Trump’s imposition of sweeping global tariffs.
Amid the squeeze, the U.S. government is racing to fortify its domestic rare-earth supply, recently committing more than $1.6 billion to a single firm’s mining efforts. Florida is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the boom.
The state boasts high concentrations of heavy rare-earth elements, formed along its coast through millions of years of marine deposition. “Heavy” rare-earths are significantly scarcer than their “light” counterparts and harder to extract. Because of their utility in magnets for electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies, they’re also more commercially valuable.
Much of Florida’s rare-earth elements lie in Bone Valley, spanning Polk and surrounding counties, where phosphate deposits are mined for fertilizer.
Researchers at Florida Polytechnic University, in partnership with phosphate mining company The Mosaic Co., have proposed constructing a rare-earth processing plant on mining lands. But the plan is not yet economically feasible, and the extraction technology is still in the pilot stage.
For now, “urban mining” — the process of recovering raw materials from waste — may help Florida achieve its rare-earth ambitions on a smaller scale. Building a mine can take more than a decade, while dismantling an iPhone can take seconds.
Urban Mining PBC, a Florida-based public-benefit corporation, focuses on secure IT asset management, including data destruction. The company, which has locations in Jacksonville and Lauderdale Lakes, also recovers precious metals and rare earth elements from printed circuit boards and other devices.
Extracting value from increasingly sleek devices is far from simple. Modern electronics are complex machines, with small, tightly packed components. Removing the tiny deposits of valuable materials from them is a painstaking, labor-intensive process.
After disassembly, the key challenge is separation, as rare-earth elements are closely spaced on the periodic table, said David Reed, a senior scientist at Idaho National Laboratory who leads efforts in critical materials recycling and recovery.
“Their chemical structure is so similar that it’s very challenging to separate one element from the next, from the next, from the next,” Reed said.
Traditional extraction relies heavily on harsh chemicals, which, when leached, can be dangerous.
The problems are bound to multiply as more, increasingly complex gadgets enter the waste stream, said Debra Reinhart, a UCF professor emerita associated with the university’s waste-contamination detection project.
But there’s also plenty of opportunity buried in tangles of cords and piles of flat-screens, she said — if Florida and other states decide to seize it.
“It’s an infrastructure thing,” Reinhart said. “When it becomes more economical to recover materials, then a more solid business infrastructure will build around that.”