Bonney Lake Man Sentenced In Federal E-Waste Case

BONNEY LAKE, WA — The former owners of the Pacific Northwest's largest recycler of electronic waste were sentenced in a federal court this week to just more than two years in prison for conspiracy to commit write fraud.

Though they contributed to environmental damages that will likely take generations to fully realize, the two Washington men — Jeff Zirkle, 55, of Bonney Lake, and Craig Lorch, 61, of Seattle— will only spend 28 months in prison, followed by three years supervised release. Additionally, the men are required to pay $945,663 in restitution.

Zirkle and Lorch, the former co-owners of Total Reclaim, pleaded guilty to the wire fraud charge in November 2018. In doing so, the men admitted to accepting millions of dollars from multiple agencies and organizations that falsely believed the pair were using environmentally-safe methods to recycle electronics — when in fact the men were actually shipping the electronics off to China, where they were dismantled in such a way that not only risked damage to the environment but also serious health consequences for the workers there.

"Your conduct spanned seven years and only stopped because you were caught," U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones said in court, noting also the mercury poisoning that could impact untold generations of Chinese nationals. "You had multiple opportunities to say enough is enough."

From 2008 to about 2016, Zirkle and Lorch reportedly used their company to export more than 8 million pounds of mercury-laden flat screen TVs and other electronics to Hong Kong, where the devices were not demolished safely — something the company on its face advocated strongly against.

According to officials for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Western Washington, the Total Reclaim website touted its "commitment to environmental responsibility," claiming the effort "is at the core of everything Total Reclaim does."

Furthermore, officials said the company explicitly promised "not to 'allow the export of hazardous E-waste we handle to be exported' to developing countries, where workers are known to disassemble electronics, which contain dangerous materials such as mercury, without safety precautions."

"Motivated by greed, these defendants betrayed every pledge they made to be good environmental stewards," First Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman said in a statement. "They protected their salaries of more than a million dollars a year, while harming the environment and risking the lives of disadvantaged Chinese workers who struggle daily just to support their families."

As previously reported on Patch, one of the ways in which Total Reclaim reportedly obtained the electronics was through the E-Cycle Washington program, which takes electronics dropped off at places like Goodwill and pays companies, like Total Reclaim, with manufacturer dollars to recycle the products in accordance with standards set by the state's Department of Ecology — making it unlikely that many of the people who contributed to the environmental disaster in Hong Kong even knew what they'd inadvertently done.

Zirkle and Lorch's activity eventually caught the attention of the Basel Action Network (BAN), which studies the export of electronic waste. After the men were notified of BAN's findings, the pair reportedly then falsified hundreds of shipping logs in an attempt to cover their tracks.

"Lorch and Zirkle’s crime has all the hallmarks of a classic financial fraud. It includes lies to customers and auditors, the falsification of hundreds of documents, millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, and a cover-up after the fraud was discovered," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. "But this offense stands apart from the typical fraud because the greatest damage is not measured in dollars and cents. Rather, it lies in the health consequences that resulted from defendants’ calculated choice to prioritize their own economic well-being over the health of faceless foreign workers."

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Read the original charging documents here:

Editor's Note: A previous version of this post misidentified the source of funding for Washington's E-Cycle program.