PHILADELPHIA & DALLAS—Comcast Cable has announced a partnership with Echo Environmental Holdings, LLC, to utilize a new recycling solution for its customers’ end-of-life coaxial cables.
The effort will allow approximately 70% of Comcast’s cable and coax waste to be recycled each year.
Coaxial cables include multi-layered cords with a steel inner conductor, insulating layer, and conductive shielding. These cables can be made of 27 different polymers that require separation for use in new products. Traditional recycling attempts have been successful in recovering the metals contained in the wires, but not the insulation and jacketing, which can end up in landfills.
In 2021, Echo Environmental, which is a subsidiary of Envela Corporation, created a new solution that creates high-polymer fractions from the insulation and jacketing without hazardous chemicals or incineration, allowing these substances to be reintroduced directly into supply chains as raw materials.
“Comcast works to continually recycle or divert cable equipment waste, and we have been in constant search for new technologies to maximize the recyclability and reusability of coax cable materials at end-of-life,” says Tom Vogel, senior vice president of supply chain & logistics for Comcast Cable. “Echo Environmental’s technology brings coax waste into the circular economy, converting coax into new materials that can be reintegrated into another product lifecycle.”
Echo Environmental’s first-of-its-kind plant has the capacity to recycle one million pounds of wire waste per month and will recycle approximately 70% of Comcast’s cable and coax waste each year.
