Where computers go to die -- and kill

More than 50 percent of our recycled computers are shipped overseas, where their toxic components are polluting poor communities. Meanwhile, U.S. laws are a mess, and industry and Congress are resisting efforts to stem "the effluent of the affluent."

By Elizabeth Grossman


April 10, 2006 | A parade of trucks piled with worn-out computers and electronic equipment pulls away from container ships docked at the port of Taizhou in the Zhejiang Province of southeastern China. A short distance inland, the trucks dump their loads in what looks like an enormous parking lot. Pools of dark oily liquid seep from under the mounds of junked machinery. The equipment comes mostly from the United States, Europe and Japan.

For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste to China for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal. Since 2000, it's been illegal to import electronic waste into China for this kind of environmentally unsound recycling. But tons of debris are smuggled in with legitimate imports, corruption is common among local officials, and China's appetite for scrap is so enormous that the shipments just keep on coming.

In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.

Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy organization that tracks hazardous waste, filmed these Dickensian scenes in 2004. "The volume of junk was amazing," he says. "It was arriving 24 hours a day and there was so much scrap that one truck was loaded every two minutes." Nothing has changed in two years. "China is still getting the stuff," Puckett tells me in March 2006. In fact, he says, the trend in China now is "to push the ugly stuff out of sight into the rural areas."

The conditions in Taizhou are particularly distressing to Puckett because they underscore what he sees as a persistent failure by the U.S. federal government to stop the dumping of millions of used computers, TVs, cellphones and other electronics in the world's developing regions, including those in China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Africa.

Because high-tech electronics contain hundreds of materials packed into small spaces, they are difficult and expensive to recycle. Eager to minimize costs and maximize profits, many recyclers ship large quantities of used electronics to countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. U.S. recyclers and watchdog groups like Basel Action Network estimate that 50 percent or more of the United States' used computers, cellphones and TVs sent to recyclers are shipped overseas for recycling to places like Taizhou or Lagos, Nigeria, as permitted by federal law. But much of this obsolete equipment ends up as toxic waste, with hazardous components exposed, burned or allowed to degrade in landfills.

BAN first called widespread attention to the problem in 2002, when it released "Exporting Harm," a documentary that revealed the appalling damage caused by electronic waste in China. In the southern Chinese village of Guiyu, many of the workers who dismantle high-tech electronics live only steps from their jobs. Their children wander over piles of burnt wires and splash in puddles by the banks of rivers that have become dumping grounds for discarded computer parts. The pollution has been so severe that Guiyu's water supply has been undrinkable since the mid-'90s. Water samples taken in 2005 found levels of lead and other metals 400 to 600 times what international standards consider safe.

In the summer of 2005, Puckett investigated Lagos, another port bursting with what he calls the "effluent of the affluent." "It appears that about 500 loads of computer equipment are arriving in Lagos each month," he says. Ostensibly sent for resale in Nigeria's rapidly growing market for high-tech electronics, as much as 75 percent of the incoming equipment is unusable, Puckett discovered. As a result, huge quantities are simply dumped.

Photographs taken by BAN in Lagos show scrapped electronics lying in wetlands, along roadsides, being examined by curious children and burning in uncontained landfills. Seared, broken monitors and CPUs are nestled in weeds, serving as perches for lizards, chickens and goats. One mound of computer junk towers at least 6 feet high. Puckett found identification tags showing that some of the junked equipment originally belonged to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Kansas Department of Aging, the State of Massachusetts, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the City of Houston, school districts, hospitals, banks and numerous businesses, including IBM and Intel.

Under the Basel Convention, an international agreement designed to curtail trade in hazardous waste, none of this dumping should be happening. Leaded CRT glass, mercury switches, parts containing heavy metals, and other elements of computer scrap are considered hazardous waste under Basel and cannot be exported for disposal. Electronics can be exported for reuse, repair and -- under certain conditions -- recycling, creating a gray area into which millions of tons of obsolete electronics have fallen.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation not to have ratified the Basel Convention, which would prevent it from trading in hazardous waste. The U.S. also has no federal laws that prohibit the export of toxic e-waste, nor has the U.S. signed the Basel Ban, a 1995 amendment to the convention that prohibits export of hazardous waste from Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development member countries to non-OECD countries -- essentially from wealthy to poorer nations. While this policy is intended to spur reuse and recycling, it also makes it difficult to curtail the kind of shipments BAN found in Lagos.

Despite a growing awareness of e-waste's hazards, the U.S. government, says Puckett, has done nothing in the past several years to stem the flow of e-trash. Given the Bush administration's reluctance to enact or support regulations that interfere with what it considers free trade and the difficulty of monitoring e-waste exports, the shipments continue. "Follow the material, and you'll find the vast majority of e-waste is still going overseas," says Robert Houghton, president of Redemtech Inc., a company that handles electronics recycling for a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Kaiser Permanente. As Puckett says, "Exploiting low-wage countries as a dumping ground is winning the day."

Next page: Used computers circulate through a shadowy network of recyclers and international freighters
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How to recycle your computer

A guide to how and where to dispose of your computer so it doesn't end up in a toxic dump.

By Elizabeth Grossman


April 10, 2006 | To prevent your old electronics from being melted down over a rudimentary stove in Guiyu, China, or being tossed into a landfill in Lagos, Nigeria, you'll want to choose a reputable recycler. Plenty of computer recyclers operate with transparency and environmental integrity. But in the absence of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for the industry, you have to ask hard questions and demand real answers.

You'll want to ask what the recycler does with equipment, where it sends parts for materials recovery and what it does with usable machinery and components. A reputable recycler should be able to tell you where CRTs, metals and plastics are sent, and if the company exports or uses prison labor. The recycler should also be able to tell you how it handles data destruction. Also ask if the recycler or reuse organization wipes the hard drive for you and provides documentation that it has done so. Or can the recycler tell you how to do this before you let go of your equipment?

If you are donating your equipment to a reuse organization, ask if equipment is tested before it is passed on for donation and if the company only ships working equipment. Ask who their recipient organizations are. You want to make sure equipment is going directly to qualified recipients, not speculative brokers. This helps prevent the kind of dumping BAN witnessed in Nigeria. Also check out FreeGeek in Portland, Ore., which builds computers out of salvaged parts from donated equipment. Its Web site has links to other similar organizations.

If the answer to any of these questions is, "We don't know," or, "We can't tell you," you may want to send your equipment elsewhere, as any reputable recycler or reuse organization should be able to provide answers.

One of the easiest options is to use your computer manufacturer's recycling program. Major manufacturers are acutely aware of the liabilities associated with not handling equipment properly and don't want to be the subject of a muckraking expos\ufffd. Virtually all U.S. manufacturers' take-back programs charge fees, and many require packing and shipping the equipment yourself. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a good guide to responsible recycling, finds many of the manufacture take-back programs wanting and publishes a report card on the environmental effectiveness of most of them.

The Rethink Program hosted by eBay has a good computer recycling FAQ section and many useful links to recyclers, as do CompuMentor's Tech Soup site and the EPA's eCycling Web site. But be aware that the recyclers listed on these sites have not been vetted or approved by these organizations in any way. The public agency that handles garbage disposal and recycling in your region may also list electronics recyclers on a Web site but these lists are not vetted either. Tech Soup and Rethink both have links to data-wiping software.

The Basel Action Network Web site carries a list of electronics recyclers that have signed BAN's stewardship pledge, under which recyclers agree not to export e-waste or add it to landfill, or use prison labor, and to document where equipment, parts and materials go. Its list includes recyclers in all parts of the U.S. The following links to select groups and manufacturers should help you find the best methods and places for recycling.

Government and nonprofit organizations
[all links - at Salon]

U.S. EPA Plug-in to eCycling

Northeast Recycling Council

Northwest Product Stewardship Council

Basel Action Network, Pledge Recyclers

CompuMentor

Goodwill Industries

National Cristina Foundation

eBay Rethink Program

Electronic Industries Alliance

International Association of Electronics Recyclers

Manufacturers

Apple

Canon

Dell

Epson

Gateway

Hewlett-Packard

IBM

Lexmark

Panasonic

Sony

Toshiba