Electronic products at their end-of-life are managed by one of two end-of-life management practices:
they are either collected for recycling (they may then be subsequently reused, refurbished, or recycled
for materials recovery), or disposed in landfills or waste-to-energy incinerators (see Figure 1). For this
report, we updated our estimates of the number of end-of-life electronic products that are collected for
recycling to incorporate state reports on mandated electronics collection programs and results from
our survey of recyclers. The advantages of this updated approach are that it incorporates a greater
amount of hard data (from state-mandated collection programs and from electronic product recyclers),
and provides a framework for refining future estimates as better data become available. A detailed
explanation of this approach is provided in Appendix D.