LC Spotlight

The e-Stewards team is elated to highlight members of the e-Stewards Leadership Council. The Leadership Council acts as the advisory body to the e-Stewards program, with perspectives from varying stakeholders in the industry including Processors, Enterprises, Manufacturers, Government Entities, NGOs, and International Representatives.

Joyce Kwan is the Environmental Stewardship Program Manager at Sony Electronics, where she spearheads initiatives related to e-waste management, battery regulations, and right-to-repair laws across North America. Her role focuses on ensuring compliance with environmental regulations while advancing circular economy practices within the company. Before joining Sony, Joyce served as the ESG Manager for HP, where she led the development of the company’s Sustainability Report and managed North American legislative programs, including e-waste compliance and recycling audit programs. Joyce holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Geography from the University of Toronto. 

Become an e-Stewards Lead Auditor:

If you are interested in becoming certified as a Lead Auditor to the e-Stewards Standard, please contact Selena Turnock at selena@e-stewards.org to express your interest and be added to our participant list for the next available session – date and time to be determined. 

Find Us at The Electronics Sustainability Summit (Sept 8–11, Minneapolis)

The e-Stewards team is preparing for the upcoming Electronics Sustainability Summit, taking place September 8–11 in Minneapolis.

We are proud to be participating as a non-profit collaborator, hosting an information table and taking part in conversations across the ITAD and recycling community. On the program, Daniel Puckett, e-Stewards Director of Business Development, will speak alongside Bloom ESG to highlight the Bloom + e-Stewards ITAD Environmental Benefits Calculator. Their joint session will share the story of how the partnership was formed, why credible carbon accounting is vital for our industry, and how the calculator is already helping processors communicate their avoided emissions to enterprise clients. 

We look forward to sharing our work with Bloom ESG, highlighting the calculator’s impact, and hearing from others across the industry. 

Join Us for E-Scrap 2025 (Oct 27–29, Dallas) 

We are excited to be heading to Dallas this October as Title Sponsor of the E-Scrap Conference 2025.

For years, E-Scrap has served as one of the central gatherings for our industry, and this year we’ll be there in an expanded role—leading workshops, joining key panels, and connecting with enterprises and processors throughout the event.

Registration is open now at e-scrapconference.com. Use code ESC25ESTEW for $100 off.

Talking Compliance at the ITAD Summit 2025

From Left: Daniel Puckett, Clive Hess, Giles Ward

The ITAD Summit 2025, held in July at The Bellagio in Las Vegas, once again proved to be one of the most engaging industry events of the year. Hundreds of ITAD professionals, recyclers, and service providers gathered for two days of discussion and networking.

A highlight for e-Stewards was a panel moderated by Daniel Puckett, Director of Business Development, featuring Clive Hess of CompuCycle (a member of our Leadership Council) and Giles Ward of Vyta. The session focused squarely on compliance and conformity—covering the importance of strong compliance practices, the value of standards and regulations, and practical tips to strengthen compliance programs. The exchange drew strong engagement from attendees, reinforcing the central role that standards like e-Stewards play in supporting rigorous, credible ITAD practices.

Outside the session, it was good to catch up with colleagues from across the industry and continue conversations that will carry into the months ahead.

Bloom + Makor Integration

Earlier this year, we announced the launch of the Bloom + e-Stewards ITAD Environmental Benefits Calculator—the first independently verified tool designed specifically for the ITAD and electronics recycling industry to measure avoided emissions and other environmental benefits.

Since that launch, the calculator has quickly become a cornerstone tool for processors seeking to credibly demonstrate the environmental value of reuse and recycling. Now, e-Stewards, Bloom ESG, and Makor Solutions, one of the leading ERP and logistics platforms in ITAD and electronics recycling, have partnered to integrate the Bloom + e-Stewards calculator directly into Makor’s workflow.

For ITAD providers, this integration means seamless access to the calculator within the platform they already use for asset intake, downstream tracking, and logistics management. The result is faster onboarding, simplified client reporting, and the ability to deliver ISO-verified impact data at the order level. With this integration, Makor users can generate reports on avoided emissions, materials recovery, and circularity metrics—providing the credible ESG data increasingly demanded by corporate clients, OEMs, auditors, and sustainability teams.

Because Makor is already used by hundreds of ITAD and recycling facilities worldwide, this partnership significantly expands the reach of the Bloom + e-Stewards calculator, lowering barriers to adoption and helping bring standardized, verifiable ESG reporting to the industry at scale.

Startup Spotlight: Cellhasher & Acurast – Giving Old Phones a Powerful Second Life

Billions of smartphones are produced each year, with global sales topping over 1.3 billion annually. Yet many of these devices are retired long before their computing power has truly run its course. While most assume that such devices have little to no useful life left, two innovative startups are proving otherwise—showing how they can be repurposed in ways that contribute to a more responsible and circular future.

Cellhasher has developed modular containers that can hold up to 20 recycled Android phones at a time. These units bypass lithium-ion batteries by delivering power directly to the motherboard, while linking devices together via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. A custom developed management software makes it simple to fully operate individual devices or entire fleets from a single dashboard, without needing to directly handle devices. The result is that even low-spec or partially functional phones can provide meaningful compute, storage, or connectivity when part of a larger fleet. Applications range from hosting micro-servers and training AI models to supporting humanitarian projects like the World Community Grid. For organizations with surplus mobile devices, Cellhasher offers a new avenue to extend usefulness while reducing waste.

Acurast complements this approach by providing the decentralized network where those devices can be put to work. As a blockchain-based, serverless compute platform, Acurast leverages the security already embedded in smartphones—Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)—to enable verifiable, confidential, and highly scalable workloads. Participants in the network can also earn revenue for contributing their devices’ compute power, creating a model that rewards reuse while expanding access to secure, distributed infrastructure. Today, more than 85,000 devices across 130+ countries are already onboarded, powering use cases such as tamper-proof crypto oracles, confidential AI agents, decentralized VPNs, and even zero-knowledge proof generation.

Together, Cellhasher and Acurast point toward a future where reuse is not limited to resale or material recovery, but extends into innovative, high-value applications. For the e-Stewards community, these types of breakthroughs illustrate the creativity and possibility that come from aligning reuse with measurable impact and circular economy principles.

If you’re a supplier of used or refurbished phones, or just want to learn more, please reach out at hi@acurast.com and team@cellhasher.com.

e-Stewards Standard Tip

Improvement



Consistent with many other industry standards, the e-Stewards Standard includes a section titled “Improvement”. This section places requirements on a certified organization to ensure that its stewardship management system includes a means for continuous improvement which also includes taking timely action in instances of nonconformity.

While continuous improvement can look different from facility to facility, some basic suggestions include:

• Reviewing procedures with management and relevant workers to ensure accuracy and efficiency; updating procedures when materials, tools, or outputs change
• Addressing nonconformities stemming from processes such as facility inspections, internal audits, compliance evaluations, or CB audits with root cause analysis; implement changes necessary based on root cause findings
• Review environmental or health and safety accidents, incidents, exposures, or near misses with the appropriate team made with representation from all relevant levels of the organization to ensure complete investigations, reports, and opportunities for improvement

It’s pertinent to retain documented information as evidence of all nonconformities or potential hazards including those identified in audits, any regulatory violations, environmental releases, or health and safety accidents, incidents, injuries, exposures, or near misses.

Continuous improvement of the management system and performance of the organization is essential to ensure processes and procedures are staying up to date with internal, customer, certification, and regulatory requirements as well as industry best practices.

If there are any questions regarding Material Balance Accounting or other interpretations of the e-Stewards Standard, please contact Selena Turnock, Certification Director, at selena@e-stewards.org.

About e-Stewards:

The e-Stewards® Initiative is a market-based solution to help individuals and organizations identify and promote electronics recyclers who ensure that used electronics are managed with the highest environmental and social responsibility standards. e-Stewards Certified Recyclers and Refurbishers are audited and certified to ensure the highest levels of responsibility. e-Stewards Enterprises are major corporations, municipalities, nonprofits, or institutions that agree to make their best efforts to use e-Stewards Certified Recyclers. e-Stewards is a program established by the environmental advocacy organization Basel Action Network. See e-Stewards Video.

Do you have news, photos, or videos about your company? We welcome submissions and invite you to share ideas with info@e-stewards.org. Thank you for reading!