Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence Lithium Batteries Are Setting Recycling Facilities on Fire. ISO 45001 Is How You Prove You Saw It Coming. Every recycling and waste facility in North America is currently living through the same slow-motion escalation. Fire Rover, the fire detection firm that has tracked the industry's incident data for nearly a decade, recorded 448 publicly reported fires at waste and recycling facilities across the United States and Canada in 2025, causin

Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence For most of the ITAD (IT Asset Disposition) industry's history, the hierarchy has been simple to state and harder to live up to: reuse before recycling, recycling before disposal. R2v3 has always built that priority into its core requirements, pushing certified recyclers toward refurbishment and resale ahead of material recovery. What's changed recently isn't the hierarchy itself. It's that two outside forces, state right-to-repair law and

Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence In March 2026, Thai customs officials at Laem Chabang Port opened a set of shipping containers declared as originating from Haiti. What they found instead was electronic waste, and the paperwork behind it did not add up. Thailand, a party to the Basel Convention since 2023, invoked the treaty's return-to-sender provision and sent the containers back toward their true point of origin. Thai authorities have not publicly named the U.S. exporte

Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence At first, the story of railways and solar panels coming together sounds like an unlikely pairing. A railway is motion and precision, it uses energy. It’s noise, weight, schedules, safety systems, and maintenance windows. Solar power is weather, light, patience, and it creates energy. One is very old technology that demands strict control, while the other is much newer technology that rewards experimentation. So when people started talkin

Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence The day an organization earns a certification feels like a finish line. A binder closes, a certificate goes on the wall, and the team exhales. But the standard behind that certificate didn't stop moving the day the audit ended. It kept revising, adding appendices, tightening definitions, and raising expectations. This change happens in the background, while the certificate on the wall stays exactly the same. The 2023 R2v3 transition deadli

Brought to you by IBEC Intelligence The cruise industry has become a popular segment of global tourism, with millions of passengers boarding ships every year to explore exotic destinations. In fact, according to reports by the Cruise Lines International Association, in 2025, nearly 37.7 million passengers went on a cruise globally. This marked continued growth from the 34.6 million who sailed in 2024. Of this total, roughly 20.7 million Americans went on ocean cruises in 20