Comcast greens up its coax recycling program

Comcast has stepped up its recycling program for old coax by teaming with Echo Environmental Holdings on what they say is a new and unique program that breaks down end-of-life cables into materials that can be reused or resold.

The Echo Environmental plant is operational and has already begun to process Comcast's cable waste, an official said.

Figure 1: Comcast will tap into Echo Environmental's first-of-its-kind plant to recycle roughly 70% of the operator's cable and coax waste.
(Image source: Comcast)

The composition of coax makes recycling a special challenge. Cables are made up of multi-layered cords with a steel inner conductor, insulating layer and conductive shielding. Comcast and Echo Environmental estimate that cables can be made up of 27 different polymers that require separation for use in new products. Traditional recycling methods have been able to recover the metals contained in the wires, but not the insulation and jacketing, which can end up in landfills, they said.

To overcome that challenge, Carrollton, Texas-based Echo Environmental developed a new solution that creates high-polymer fractions from the insulation and jacketing "without hazardous chemicals or incineration," enabling those substances to be reintroduced directly into supply chains as raw materials.

"This was a completely custom proprietary system developed for Comcast," Tommy McGuire, Echo Environmental's president, explained in an email exchange. It's not clear if or when the company might attempt to extend or adapt the new recycling tech to other operators.

"Echo Environmental's technology brings coax waste into the circular economy, converting coax into new materials that can be reintegrated into another product lifecycle," Tom Vogel, SVP of supply chain and logistics for Comcast Cable, said in a statement.

New process to handle most of Comcast's coax waste

The companies claim that Echo Environmental's first-of-its-kind plant has the capacity to recycle 1 million pounds of wire waste per month, and will recycle roughly 70% of Comcast's cable and coax waste.

Prior to the partnership with Echo Environmental, Comcast was recycling all of its cable waste with a range of vendors and partners, but a spokesperson notes that the new solution with Echo Environmental enables the operator to get the waste to "purity levels needed for reintroduction as raw materials." Comcast's remaining cable and coax is already recycled with another vendor that is working towards the same purity levels now being achieved by the partnership with Echo Environmental, a Comcast official added.

Comcast doesn't break out its waste by specific products or materials, but past figures from Comcast's National Recycling Program offer a sense of the size and scale of the coax project. By the end of 2019, Comcast's program has recycled or diverted from landfills more than 65 million pounds of cable equipment waste. The program enables technicians to use color-coded bins to sort recyclable materials such as taps, splitters, cords, cables, batteries and cardboard.

Comcast's total network, a blend of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) and some fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), ended 2021 passing 60.52 million homes and businesses. That figure is expected to grow as Comcast aims to get more aggressive with network expansions that include edge-outs to adjacent areas and potential greenfield opportunities.

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading