ReMA Electronics Chair Highlights Challenges and Opportunities in Electronics Recycling

Amanda Tischer Buros, Vice President of OEM solutions at Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations, has been chair of ReMA’s electronics division since October 2024. According to Buros, Dynamic Lifecycle had been a longtime member of ReMA but only started becoming more involved in the association in 2021 after some of the Basel plastic implementations.

“I was hearing a lot about the ReMA electronics division monthly meetings and virtual calls and how ReMA had been providing such helpful and important information about what was going on with Basel,” she said. “We quickly realized that ReMA was a source for real insights on some of the key issues impacting our business.”

It was only a matter of time before Buros started attending the monthly calls and moved into a more active role coming into the quarterly board meetings and soon that enthusiasm and activism led her to her current role as electronics division chair.

ReMA News chatted with Buros about her goals for the electronics division as well as current issues and opportunities facing electronics recyclers.

As the electronics division chair, what are some of your short-term and long-term goals?

In the short-term, we’ve spent the last couple of board meetings asking for feedback from electronics division members about key topics impacting our division. These include putting together a battery policy working group, Basel updates, and the recent trade and tariff issues. Outside of those areas, we’ve also been polling our members to learn what would be most valuable for them.

For 2025, we’ve centered our focus by creating different subcommittees for certification developments and updates. Most of our members are involved in one or more industry certifications such as R2, e-Stewards, or RIOS. The R2V3 Standards entered its fifth year of publication in 2025. We want to ensure our members get the insights they need and for us to provide feedback and recommendations on their behalf.

We’re looking to expand into some reuse opportunities to support our ITAD members. A few critical issues for that group are Right to Repair legislation and unlocking devices that we can’t get through reuse channels. We are starting a subcommittee focused on ITAD centric issues and we’re reviewing the reuse and end-of-life specifications, so we have aligned on how we are classifying and moving our materials.

In the long term, membership growth is key. We want a strong division to get people involved, and we’re looking for the next group of division leaders. As we continue to serve as the voice for electronics recyclers, we’re working on the best ways to grow and diversify. One way is to involve more IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) companies. We’re seeing an evolution of electronics in different types of devices like appliances and vehicles. We want to make sure we are an active voice in this changing environment and that means bringing in a larger pool of individuals and companies into the division.

What are the current challenges and opportunities facing electronics recyclers?

Battery safety and management are huge concerns. Many of our members are part of some type of collection, aggregation, or sortation stream of batteries where they naturally come in through our products. Many of us with large-scale shredding equipment must put in a lot of time and energy to remove the batteries from that stream, so we don’t have situations where we have fires or safety problems.

We’re grateful that ReMA’s Battery Working group is tackling this issue to help recyclers navigate the challenges regarding battery safety and management. We started with small-format batteries, and we’re moving into medium-format and electric vehicles (EVs) but as electronics recyclers, batteries are in almost everything and anything. I think technology will be key to our evolution in managing those devices in the future.

I work on the side of electronics where we do a lot of extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation in different states. We’re coming up on 20-plus years for some of the EPR programs being in effect. We’re getting to the point where the original modeling is starting to become outdated. We want to review the modeling to determine if there are better ways to put together those EPR programs. For example, they were originally built when cathode ray tubes (CRTs) were used for electronic devices.

However, electronics have become much smaller and the way we calculate obligations doesn’t always align with how much volume there is, so there are some different models that could be reevaluated.