Last month, I
described
how the computer industry encourages planned obsolescence in order to sell more product. This business model exacerbates the problem of computer disposal because it artificially shortens computer lifespans. This increases production and, ultimately, the numbers requiring disposal. One result is that
e-waste
— electronics waste — is one now one of our most pressing environmental challenges. UpdatedThere are about
one billion
PC’s in use worldwide. There are an additional several hundred million sitting in basements and attics awaiting disposal. Given average
lifespans
of only two to five years, a tidal wave of computers requiring disposal sweeps towards us.In the United States, thevast majority will not properly disposed of.
What toxins do consumer PC’s contain? Where do they end up? And what can
you
do about it?
A Toxic Brew
Let’s start with the toxins computers
contain. It’s not a pretty picture:
|
Toxin: |
Use and Effects: |
|
Lead |
CRT display monitors contain anywhere from two to eight pounds of lead, which can cause brain damage in children andother neurological effects if ingested. CRT’s are being disposed of in massive numbers, due to the switch to flat-panel technology. (We’re seeing the same phenomenon in TV disposal as the public switches from analog to digital TV). Circuit board soldering also contains lead. |
|
Mercury and Arsenic |
Flat panel and laptop displays contain mercury and arsenic, poisonous even in small amounts. Mercury is also present in circuit boards. |
|
Cadmium |
Every desktop contains a battery, and laptops contain two or three. Cadmium is among the toxicants in batteries. It’s also found in SMD chip resistors, semiconductors, infrared dectectors, and some plastics. Cadmium is a known carcinogen that concentrates within the human body. |
|
Phosphorus |
The insides of CRT display monitors are coated with phosphorus dust. You don’t want to inhale it. |
|
BFR’s |
Brominated flame retardants or BFR’s coat computer plastics. BFR’s have hormonal effects and leading manufacturers like Apple have stopped using them. |
|
Beryllium |
Beryllium is another known carcinogen, used in circuit boards and connectors. |
|
Polyvinyl Chloride and Plastics |
PVC and plastics compose roughly 20% of computers. Burning them releases dioxins and furans. |
|
Barium |
Barium is present in CRT’s to protect users from radiation. It’s not as beneficial in landfills or your drinking water. |
Burning computer components releases dioxins, furans, PCB’s, and other toxins into the atmosphere, and also into the lungs of anyone nearby. Why would anyone incinerate a PC? It’s the cheapest, low-tech way to separate the worthless plastics from the salable metals. If you reside in a poor country without environmental and safety standards, this is how you separate and “recycle” materials. For example,yank the wires from desktops, then burn them to separate the worthless rubberized plastic coating from the salable copper within.
With over 1,000 different materials going into computer manufacture, it’s not surprising many harmful elements are involved. You can encourgage manufacturers to limit the toxins they put into computer equipment. Just use the web tool called
EPEAT
to buy the most environmentally-friendly items. EPEAT has a database of several thousand computers and displays and rates them all on a variety of environmental criteria.
Where Do The Toxins End Up?
Where all the toxins in computers end up depends on many factors, one of which is the country disposing of them. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency
estimates
that less than 15% of e-waste is properly recycled. Of the remaining 85% that is improperly disposed of, some goes straight into landfills. Most goes overseas.
The overseas trade works like this. The U.S.
imports
billions of dollars of goods from China every year. All these items arrive in standard shipping containers. Since the U.S.
exports
very little back to China (as measured by volume), the majority of these shipping containers go back to China empty. So shipping to China is very inexpensive, and shipping even very low-value items there makes economic sense.
While Americans are eager to dispose of their toxic e-waste, China lacks the safety and environmental standards common to developed nations. And the Chinese labor rate is very low.
This combination of cheap shipping, inexpensive labor, and a lack of safety and environmental law breeds a thriving export trade. Computers and other e-waste goes to China and sometimes Africa where it is “recycled” with a complete lack of environmental and safety rules.
A few
pictures
tell the story. Here’s how your old monitor is dissassembled to get at the valuable copper inside. Workers lack protection against inhaling the phosphorus dust coating on the inside of the display screen:
These Nigerian children pose in front of open-air e-waste burning next to their home:
This former farmer is picking chips off circuit boards by bathing them in acid. He has no protection from the acid fumes:
These pictures are courtesy of
Basel Action Network
((c) 2010), an organization dedicated to eliminating these practices.
Of course,
any
economic activity has its downsides and scofflaws. The critical question is: how prevalent is this export trade? How much American e-waste ends up being improperly recycled in China and Africa?
The firms engaged in this toxic trade try to hide what they’re doing, so one can only estimate. I’ve found responsible estimates asserting that from 50% to 80% of American e-waste goes into this business. The phenomenon has become so prevalent that it has been exposed repeatedly in the media. Check out
60 Minutes,
NPR,
PBS Frontline,
CNN,
BBC World News, and the
Huffington Post.
This tradehas become a thriving business. Companies called “fake recyclers” approach well-meaning organizations — charities, churches, and community organizations — and offer to hold a Recycling Day. The charity provides publicity, legitimacy, and a parking lot for the event. On the designated day, well-meaning residents drop off their old electronics for recycling. The fake recycler picks it up in their trucks, hauls it away for shipping, and makes money by exporting it to Chinese or African “recycling” centers. Nobody’s the wiser.
This
story, for example, describes how alleged fake recycler EarthEcycle approached the Humane Society, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the Boy Scouts of America for a “recycling” event. Seven e-waste containers were traced to Hong Kong and South Africa.
Organizations with outstanding reputations areconned into participating in this business while believing they are engaging in beneficial activity. It’s not their fault. Since fake recycling is unregulated by U.S. law, anyone is free to call themselves a recycler and sell materials into the overseas trade. Misrepresentation about it is not illegal. Fake recycling is a thriving business.
It’s Not Illegal?
Given that U.S. environmental practice has dramatically improved since the first Earth Day in 1970, one might wonder that fake recycling is legal. In fact, the international community devised a set of rules and agreements to control e-waste disposal and make sure that it’s done properly. Generically called the
Basel Conventions, these were initiated in 1989 in Basel, Switzerland, and have evolved forward since then.
Over 150 nations around the world adhere to the Basel Conventions. The United States is one of fourthat have not ratified — and do not adhere to — these international agreements.
These
charts
show that the United States is the international “bad boy” of computer recycling.
While one can only speculate as to why this is, it does seem clear that U.S. policy is
captive
to lobbyists and driven by narrow special interests.
It costs several dollars per item to properly dispose of much e-waste, and our society has decided not to pay that price. Instead those costs are imposed on the environment and those who work overseas in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
What You Can Do
If you want to rectify this situation, educate yourself, then become socially and politically active. The public looks to IT professionals, industry participants, computer engineers and hobbyists for special understanding on technical issues. Legislators look to us for leadership. If the computer-savvy community remains ignorant, rest assured these practices will not change.
Computer community leaders have already scored major successes. One example are vendor “take back” programs, where computer manufacturers and sellers take back used equipment for recycling. A decade ago few programs existed. Today
all
major companies have take back programs. Several
vendors
have recently announced that their programs specifically forbid export recycling, and as the word about fake recycling spreads and public awareness builds, others will likely follow.
If you have an old computer you no longer use, please do not let it sit in your attic or basement. As a volunteer at the non-profit computer refurbisher
Free Geek Chicago, I often receive donations that we could have fixed up and gotten to the needy — had they not been aged in storage for several years.
As IT professional, computer expert or hobbyst, you use current equipment. Please understand that a computer you discard may be useful to others. About
one-quarter
of Americans do not own a computer. For many, a five to ten year old machine for basic activities like web surfing, word processing, and email means they don’t have to trek to the public library or wait at school to use a shared computer. An older computer makes an excellent secondary machine for a large family. We have such demand for laptops at Free Geek that even Pentium II laptops find immediate placement.
For any computer you want to dispose of, please donate it to a
refurbisher
rather than to a
recycler. A refurbisher reuses the equipment, while a recycler destroys it and reuses the component materials. Vendor take-back programs do not refurbish because they can not afford the labor to do this. They only recycle. But there are many non-profit refurbishers. You can find refurbishers to donate your old computer to
here,
here,and
here.
Ask any refurbisher how far back they can reuse equipment. Organizations such as
Free Geek
can reuse computers up to ten years old (Pentium III’s or better). Our “secret sauce” is a lightweight Linux distribution. Most refurbishers only reuse about five years back.
Your goal should be to get a reburisher that reuses rather than recycles what you have to donate.
If your equipment is too old to be refurbished, how do you avoid fake recyclers? It can be difficult to identify them because most know full well that the public would be repulsed if they knew what their business entailed. They hide what they do. So you have to look for red flags. One red flag is that they accept CRT display monitors, TV’s, and computer printers for free. These items can almost never be reused, and it costs money to environmentally recycle them. Organizations that environmentally recycle these items take a monetary loss on them if they don’t ask for a small recycling fee. Printer disposal costs are usually about
$3 to $10, and monitor and TV fees, $10 to $20.
Inspect the recycler’s website. If it does not show photos of “the crusher” and other de-manufacturing equipment, be suspicious. Fake recyclers post happy pictures of trucks eagerly hauling e-waste and nice stacks of computers in their building awaiting “recycling.” What you’re really seeing is collection and a distribution point for overseas shipping.
Finally, look for
Basel Action Network‘s
E-Steward
certification program. This initiative certifies recyclers through strict standards. Unfortunately the program is new and the certification process is rather involved. So there are many worthy refurbishers and recyclers that the program does not list.
Coming Up …
My previous OSNews
article
discussed the environmental impact of retiring computers before their time and how planned obsolescence forces this. This article exposed the fake recycling business. Now it’s time to get technical. Next month I’ll describe how to revitalize mature computers. Let’s go refurbishing!
Update:
Since
this article has appeared, two export refurbishers have mentioned to me
that by
omitting legitimate overseas refurbishing from the discussion, the
article seems to
say that ALL overseas recycling is unsafe or unhealthy. This certainly
is not the case and it was not my intent to imply it was. The goal of
the article is simply to bring to the attention of the IT
community the abuses that can occur in overseas recycling.
Robin Ingenthron
writes an excellent blog
that shares his years of experience in overseas refurbishing, detailing
both the challenges involved and the successes possible. He explains
how,
done right, overseas refurbishing leads to both inexpensive computers
and jobs in developing nations.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Howard Fosdick (President, FCI) is an independent consultant who specializes in databases and operating systems. He’s been active in computer reuse and recycling as a hobby for over fifteen years.
Resources
|
Free Geek Chicago |
Reuse and Recycling |
|
Free Geek |
Reuse and Recycling |
|
Electronics Take Back Coalition |
E-waste information |
|
Basel Action Network |
Fights fake recycling |
|
Earth911 |
Complete information |
|
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency |
The EPA on ecycling |
Thanks for posting this!
I have some old PC’s that I never got rid of for this reason… I don’t want some poor person in another country having to dismantle my monitor and inhaling all the noxious crap that’s inside it, or the fumes from melting PC components either.
I didn’t really want to give them to recyclers for the same reason incase they ended up in landfill. I know it’s only making a small impact, since people chuck these things away every day.
Good advice though, maybe I’ll try giving them to a computer charity now.
Also Freecycle is another good way of donating an old PC to people in your local area.
Freecycle is an excellent initiative. Every week there are people giving away computers in my city. All my friends know about this web site. I only use Freecycle for clothing and lots of computer parts now.
Yes, you don’t want to see your PC end up as African landfill.
However, it is a bit of a concern that I cannot find “WEEE” mentioned in an article and +30 comments. The US could take some clues from that piece of legislation.
Also, the world should thank Europe for RohS, since this ousts hazardous materials to some extent not only in EU but everywhere (because manufacturers all over the world want to export to EU and hence have to comply).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832903/
This is a great movie on the topic.
I volunteer at Free Geek Portland and have had a great time there. I meet interesting people and it is nice to do something positive with my spare time.
There are a lot of people in the world who are in need of computers. Why isnt there an effort to match people who no longer need their perfectly working computers because they are upgrading to those who are in need of one?
Two reasons: a lack of knowledge(1) and proprietary software(2)
1) Most people know very little about their computer and don’t realize that a spyware ridden computer can work perfectly fine after wiping the spyware and/or reinstalling the OS. People that don’t know this assume their computer is “old and useless” and would prefer to chunk it instead of donating it to someone.
2) With proprietary software licenses, you do not actually own the software on your computer. Instead, you own a license that allows you to use the software. This can create a hairy situation when you shift ownership to someone else who was not originally licensed to use the software. This may or may not be a problem, but it will be if the new owner ever needs to reinstall and reactivate the proprietary software originally installed on the computer.
This always makes me want to cry. I hear stories all the time: “Yeah, my old computer started getting slow, and I think I got a virus, so I threw it away and got a new computer.” And I tell them: “Tell me that before you do that and just give the computer to me. I could just wipe the hard drive and get rid of the virus.” And then they don’t believe that that is even possible…
Ok, #1 I agree with, but #2, no way.
Most OEM PCs, which is the way most people get Windows, has the license for Windows attached to the PC, not the user. There is nothing stopping somebody, anybody from reinstalling an OEM copy of Windows on those PCs. Most other software can be installed on 1 pc at a time so it can be moved to another pc, so that statement doesn’t really stand up under scrutiny.
It all boils down to at least two things: cost and import/export restrictions. The former is usually the most fundamental; we need some money to collect, store, and finally distribute those used computers. Voluntary participation isn’t enough to such reuse in an interstate basis (i.e. collect used computers from one wealthy state and distribute them in another).
Import-export restrictions apply mainly to efforts that cross national boundaries.
I have personally refurbished many older computers for schools and charities, the only problem with this being power consumption. It’s a fact that older computers (P2, P3, MacG5) take orders of magnitude more power than today’s computer, and get less performance per watt from that power. Does the savings in landfill and waste justify the carbon footprint of these “gas guzzler”? While there is no easy answer to this, I always try to use the latest hardware to refurbish, and leave the really old stuff to be actuLly recycled.
Actually, you are wrong. PII/PIII for example use much less peak power than today’s multi-core processors. Don’t believe me? Accumulate a large number of machines and start testing their power usage at the wall with a watt-meter, then come back and provide your results.
But this part I’ll agree with.
It depends entirely on the use of the hardware. If the recycled computer is used only an hour or two a day, it probably makes very little actual difference in energy usage. (especially if the task is not CPU-intensive to begin with)
If it’s left on 24×7, then things start to get fuzzy. Just like with a car, the more you actually drive it, the more gas mileage actually matters – otherwise an older “functional” car is perfectly fine for the occasional trip down the road.
It’s often more energy efficient to reuse than to replace/recycle. Beware of greenwashers who would like you to believe otherwise.
Edited 2010-07-07 19:43 UTC
In a processor to processor test a Nahalem does use more power than a P3, but what I was referring to (and maybe I wasn’t specific enough) was P2 complete systems. Today’s hard drives and other internals have better power management features than before. A complete system now can run a web browser at idle for under 20 watts, a P2 or P3 system would be atleast 75 watts for the same given performance. Yes, the issue of software licensing can come into play, but if you use open source software that is eliminated. Where I live electricity costs $0.45 a kWh, so if your only paying $0.09 it may be different. I’ve replaced entire racks of systems and saved more money in electric in one year than the new machines costs. It all depends on your perspective and situation. If you were in the Sahara desert, than 100 watts is a lot, and that 10 watt netbook looks rather nice to run off solar.
Indeed, and if you have many machines running 24×7 – as I said before, it would make a difference. As a residential PG&E customer, who often hits Tier 5 above Baseline (which is $0.31/kWh), I understand the pain of high power bills as well, and I have replaced several older rack-mounted machines with lower powered Atom-based machines for that very reason.
But, that doesn’t mean that a PII/III machine used for an hour of email or Facebook each day is a bad thing – and I suspect most home users actually shut their computers off after using them rather than relying on power management features. And even an older PIII ATX machine will go to sleep with power management enabled.
In the grand scheme of things, recycling older machines by putting Linux on them, and giving them to people who can’t otherwise afford a $300 computer sure seems like a good idea to me – especially if they only use them for word processing and school homework.
It’s totally worth it for the people that couldn’t otherwise afford a computer.
I’ve done the same thing with Pentium II/III/IV computers. Cleaned then up, install Ubuntu or whatever OS is best suiting the specs of the computer and given them to needy families.
This is a really worthy topic.
In the UK at least, there was a programme on BBC3 recently called Blood Sweat and Luxuries: Gold and eWaste which covered this topic http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78 sadly iPlayer is not showing it right now, but it will inevitably be repeated
It was a real eye opener for me, and I regret I did not know more of this before. Hundreds, thousands of tonnes of used computers – most branded with corporate / government asset tags, including a lot from the UK, just dumped in Africa by so called legitimate recycling companies.
basically, these organisations handing off responsibility to 3rd parties without any sort of checking what they were actually doing.
Then kids were scrabbling about the huge dumps scavenging stuff, burning the toxic plastics and such like to extract tiny amounts of metal for resale, breathing awful fumes. it was utterly dreadful.
I agree repositioning and reusing old kit is the preferred option, but at some point, there is the end of a line, where even the reusers won’t touch it, so provision needs to be made for kit at this point. It was scandalous to see all this western equipment dumped like this.
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/futurama/index.jhtml
Watch the E-Waste Delivery scene from “Attack of the Killer App”
direct link
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=314027&titl…
The move to laptops will severely cut down on waste, especially with the demise of CRT monitors.
Reliability improves every year which will reduce waste even further.
With desktops, maybe. But I’ve never retired a desktop because it was broken, and some I had longer then 10 years.
With laptops, no. The poor cooling seems to just kill them, as with all electronics. I haven’t seen that situation improve, at least with the fairly-powerful laptops I’ve bought.
Laptops run cooler and have hard drives that are much more reliable than ones from 10 years ago. Not as reliable as desktops but they have gotten better.
As for your situation I would suggest buying a Toshiba Satellite. I spilled an entire 12oz latte on the keyboard of one and it kept ticking.
I would actually recommend not getting a Toshiba Satellite. Many of the models have huge issues with cooling. I can’t even run my laptop for more than an hour without overheating (especially in this 30 C weather…). Other than that though, they are very nice laptops, though a bit expensive.
Which model?
Some laptops are shipped with power settings that are based on testing in a cooler environment. Try turning down the maximum processor state in power settings.
Not really, laptops cannot be stripped for parts and used in a new computer(other than RAM and HD). Components from desktops can be used for years, moved from box to box. Monitors, keyboards, mice, NICs, video cards, hard drives, ram are all parts that can be re purposed. Laptops, you have to upgrade the whole widgit.
That’s for sure. I still use a dual Pentium III Tualatin box (1.4ghz) all the time. The case is one from a P2 I had had years earlier, some of the memory is from the P2, video card is from the p2, some of the HDDs are from the p2, ditto for the soundcard. I’ve also slapped some new parts in it. PCs are far mroe “eco friendly” than laptops imo :p
I plan on using this p3 box for many many more years.
Most desktops are dumped entirely for a new one. It’s only the geeks that keep switching parts out.
Great article, as was the previous one.
Two things I would add:
1) For those of us in the Great White North, Industry Canada has a program called “Computers for Schools” – they refurbish donated computers & distribute them to schools, libraries, NPOs, etc.
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cfs-ope.nsf/eng/Home
On the flipside, there’s a site called VFXweb that sells refurbished hardware for absurdly little – the prices are usually on par with what you can find on eBay, without being as much of a crap-shoot.
http://vfxweb.com
I don’t think there’s anything listed there for more than $200 CAD, including PCs with licensed copies of XP included. It’s actually the cheapest legit method I’ve seen for getting an XP license these days… which is probably a large part of the problem, the fact that it’s often cheaper to be wasteful (in general, but particularly with computers and consumer electronics). But, I digress.
2) in addition to the big-picture benefits, there are also some direct, immediate benefits to the end user. The obvious one is cost – E.g. you can get a used/refurb’d ultralight laptop for about the same cost as a high-end netbook, which will have almost the exact same virtues of a netbook (size & weight) but with much more capable hardware.
The other direct benefit of used/refurb’d hardware is less obvious, almost downright counterintuitive: reliability. Based on my own highly-unscientific, anecdotal experience, used hardware actually tends to fail *less* than brand-new hardware. There are probably some larger enconomic/cultural factors at play, but (IMO) it boils down to this: working, used hardware is much more of a “known quantity” than hardware that’s brand-new.
I already recycle, atleast in my own way; I never throw away any working electronics, even if it is outdated and in no way useful to me anymore. I’ve gotten a full closet of such stuff nowadays and it’s taking some space. But I think it’s well worth it. I’ve sometimes had something break up on me suddenly and I’ve had to use the outdated stuff in the meantime while waiting to get a new one, and I’ve had friends asking me for spare sparts quite a many times. It’s saved both me and friends some money and needless new parts.
Eventually when I can’t really store any more stuff I’ll go through them, find the ones I think are of least probable use to anyone and find some electronics recycling center for them.
I’ve given a couple old machines away, and run several others for 7-10 years or more as servers or firewalls after they became too outdated to run ever-more-bloated desktop software. I even hung onto them after that, until I ran out of storage space.
The Free Geek idea intrigues me, but I don’t know how much demand there would be in my smaller town. I also don’t know how much people that aren’t completely destitute are interested in a 6-year-old PC running Linux when they can get a netbook running Windows (like their friends, schools, and jobs do) for $300-$400.
You just want to take jobs away from nigerian children.
Why do you hate the children?
…in all seriousness, though, refurbishing a few machines will help those you give them to (so I’m for it).
I just refurbed a machine this last week for my luddite brother, who has decided to start college at age 30;
Lets not kid ourselves about this activity making a dent in the mountain of e-waste being generated and shipped overseas.
And lets not pretend that everybody’s going to be happy if we try to stop the waste export. There are whole communities that exist around waste recycling. They may not understand the toxicity of the chemicals they are burning, but they know that they depend on the money it brings in.
I don’t have the answers, but instead of complaining about the current situation, why not actually think of real alternatives, so we can debate the pros and cons of each choice.
/Sarcasm on
Oh, yes, and remember that hand-wringing liberals really won’t make a difference to current trends in people smuggling, either. Why do we hate slave-traders? They may not care what they do, but they understand that the amount of money they make gives them some benefit.
/Sarcasm off
For instance, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, our waste management system is far superior to most municipalities in the world. This includes e-waste management, which is actually recycled at local facility:
http://www.edmonton.ca/for_residents/garbage_recycling/geep-electri…
There’s no reason a similar system could not be employed in other municipalities.
That would be really great!
Local handling of the waste really would be the best of all possible worlds.
As long as they can make money or at least break even on the process, I absolutely favor handling it at a municipal level.
…so I guess that means I want to take jobs away from Nigerian children too.
Edited 2010-07-08 18:58 UTC
Overall a well-written piece, but it recycles several myths about the “e-waste” business. I wrote some pieces like this about ten years ago. Since that time, I left the environmental regulatory field and became active in the electronics recycling and (gasp!) exporting business. As a former Peace Corps volunteer and intl relations major, I was comfortable flying to visit these end markets profiled by 60 minutes etc., hoping to somehow reform them and to create a “fair trade” scenario.
What I found is that the ingenuity of the technicians in countries which manufactured the PCs has been vastly underestimated, and that the photos you repost (from BAN.org) are cartoonish. Yes, places like Guiyu exist. And there are dead people at hospitals. If you take someone unfamiliar with a hospital on a tour via the morgue, they could write an eyewitness “scandal” piece – that most people sent to hospitals are not healed but killed. About 70% of exports are properly recycled. 30% is too high a reside rate, and those refurbishers need fair trade incentives to deal with junk along for the ride, but a boycott of those markets works about as well as a boycott on coffee to help coffee farmers. E-Stewards in particular has taken a “war on drugs” approach to demand for affordable PCs, and most of the recyclers have stopped refurbishing in favor of shredding.
Here was an attempt I made to get the “Myths” about ewaste recycling out in the open and to freshen the debate.
http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/04/top-ten-myths-about-e-waste….
Elsewhere in my blog you’ll find photos and film of exceptional export operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Africa. For monitors and P3-p4 exports, most (about 70%) of the imports are purchased for white box PC remanufacture, and in the case of monitors especially, the upgrading is done at the same exact factories in the same working conditions as the original monitor was made(Foxconn, BenQ, Proview, Wistron).
The Basel Convention, under Annex IX B1110 explicitly acknowledges these factories and states they are completely legal.
In the 60 Minutes piece, the export container clearly shows “toxics along for the ride” (junk mixed in with refurbishable product) and producer Solly Granatstein gets credit for exposing a USA hypocrite. However, CBS also had photographic evidence of the factories in Guangdong which purchase the monitors in the Hong Kong segment. Most telling, there is not a single monitor to be seen in Guiyu (the morgue). It’s outrageous.
My company does NOT export PCs for scrap, we demanufacture P3 and below in the USA, and I’m afraid of getting a bad rep by defending our contract manufacturing/refurb partners overseas. I also have lowball competitors who don’t hire people to remove bad junk from the export containers, and welcome scrutiny to level the playing field. But it is painful to see engineers who manufactured the CRT monitors depicted as hammer-wielding, sandal-wearing Viet Cong. This has become a campaign worthy of Senator tailgunner Joe McCarthy. “Are you now, or have you ever been, an exporter of e-waste?”
Anyway, I respect what you are writing and you will find I agree with you on much. But the “Al Jolson” stereotypes of the export markets really needs to stop. There are no photos being shown of the factories which purchase 5000 used monitors per day and refurbish them to new condition, sold in boxes with warrantees to markets desperate for a $30 display device. There is not a PC to be seen anywhere in many of the BAN photos (mainly kids at landfills which have about as many electronics in them as Nigeria would domestically generate – certainly not enough evidence to say that 80% of the imports are junk).
The export business certainly has flaws, but most of these will be overcome by having better people export more product, giving the refurbishers more choices, and better incentives to manage “toxics along for the ride“.
I hope you will check out the good ideas that our out there, including the idea to get a “spare tire” OS onto every government purchased PC via EPEAT. There are some fresh ideas out there in the “fair trade” market for used PCs. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/03/two-good-ideas-for-solving-e… I like the references to Vance Packard’s “Waste Makers” (planned obsolescence) and there is definitely a lot to write about. Unfortunately, the anti-export crusade is largely about obsolescence in hindsight, as USA manufacturers try to stop the contract manufacters like Foxconn from refurbishing their PCs and selling them again via Tiger Direct (search “Dell v. Tiger Direct” for the 2009 lawsuit, followed weeks later by Dell’s “no export of intact units” policy).
So, as an exporter, do you believe the U.S.A. should ratify and conform to the Basel agreements? Why or why not?