DENVER -- A warehouse owner is stuck with thousands of TVs abandoned by a recycling company that no longer exists. The majority of the TVS are broken and, therefore, are toxic e-waste.

Kevin McAllister leased the warehouse to a man who said he was launching a recycling company.

But when the tenant didn’t pay the rent, McAllister took the keys.

“You can’t even get out without hitting TVs … they’re everywhere,” said McAllister as he walked through his warehouse."He ran out of room inside the building and started loading up the outside."

McAllister told 7NEWS he had no idea what was going on inside.

“All I ever saw was trucks coming and going, so I just assumed some were dropping off stuff and others taking away,” McAllister said.

State Officials Unaware Of Recycling Warehouse

The State Department of Public Health and Environment regulates recyclers, but 7NEWS found the company never registered with the state.

In fact, the state didn’t even know that a company was stockpiling TVs in the warehouse, until our investigation.

“That's correct. We were unaware of it,” said Wolf Kray, a state environmental protection specialist.

Now the state is investigating how the company was able to set up shop, stockpile TVs, and skip town.

“It's tough to say because we don't know what's going on at the operation,” Kray said.

Man Had No Intent To Recycle, Expert Says

Licensed recycler Henry Renteria-Vigil was called in to size up the situation. He said there’s no proof the former tenant was even equipped to handle e-waste.

“I caught my breath, ‘cause even for me, I'm in this business and that's still considered a lot of TVs,” Renteria-Vigil said.

He said it appears that the man had "no intent" of recycling the stockpile of TVs.

It's not clear how much money the recycler raked in to pick up the TVs. 7NEWS tried to track him down -- going to every address he had on record -- but we were not able to locate him. Even the people connected to him didn't know his location.

7NEWS is not disclosing the company's name, nor location of the warehouse, to protect what's inside. It's filled with an estimated $1 million worth of recyclable copper.

According to the landlord, it could take months to clear all the TVs out of the 20,000 square-foot warehouse.

Older TV picture tubes and computer monitors contain an average of four pounds of lead and a host of other toxic materials, including: chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc, and brominated flame retardants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection agency.

As electronic products break down in a landfill, they can leach toxic chemicals into groundwater. This has led some states to ban them from their landfills, and the EPA to classify them as hazardous waste.

Discarded televisions, computers and other electronic items comprise only 2 percent of trash in America's landfills, but 70 percent of overall toxic waste, according to the EPA.