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Report is Critical of US For Dumping E-Waste Overseas
coondoggie writes "In what may be the least astonishing news of the day, some major US companies who say they are environmentally recycling electronic waste — aren't. Rather more startling — they are dumping everything from cell phones and old computers to televisions in countries such as China and India where disposal practices are unsafe to people and dangerous to the environment. Controlling the exportation of all of the e-waste plops on the doorstep of the US Environmental Protection Agency which is doing a woeful job, according to a scathing 67-page report issued by the Government Accountability Office today."
What are the other countries doing accepting the waste? USA shouldn't be responsible for other countries' not acting responsibly.
Just callin' it like I see it.
These practices do not surprise me. Just look at our financial markets today. GREED is the word of the day! GREEN my arse! Shame on you freaking CEOs that turn a blind eye on hazardous dumping! I hope a freaking American Airlines Dump falls on your head while you are at your next corporate meeting, trying to cut costs!
I am thoroughly "shocked and awed" by the actions of the EPA under this administration, just like Mr. Rumsfeld would have wanted.
Made in China, dumped in China. What's the big deal?
So the US goes and allows (or perhaps worse, is complicit in allowing) it's corporations to keep up profits by dumping toxic products in other countries, where it kills and maims children (which is well proven) who struggle to live by supplying their lives to people who use them as slave labour to recover valuable materials from the dumped items through lethal practices, such as burning plastic from wire.
Then some people argue that if the countries allow it, why is that the US's problem?
And then twenty years later they whine like little babies that they can't understand why the survivors of this situation in those countries hate them so much and want to kill them and everyone else they see as a part of the "Western" world...
And they can't even blame the CIA this time. US corporations are doing a far more sinister job that the CIA ever did.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Hey there, big computer companies!
I'll gladly take ANY old computer hardware that still works! Finally a chance to replace that old 8bit ISA graphics card... maybe even the FPU! SWEET!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Companies could just dump it all 50 miles out at sea like the US Navy does. Instead, they send it where it can be rendered back down to it's base metals for reuse. It isn't as if countries like China are simply burying it all in landfills. FTA sounds like they actively sought out rights to have it dumped on them. They get to re-use whatever raw material can be extracted. If they had more environmentally friendly disposal practices, maybe it wouldn't be so cheap for them to render it all down and they wouldn't be so eager to buy it from us when we're done with it. All I'm saying, though, is that they are not just dumping it out at sea. We can figure out something to do with the waste on land, as long as we stop contributing to problems like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Reality is prettier inside my head...
Heh... He said "dumping" heh heh.
Anything and Everything about the Net
Does that mean those of us in States like California who have payed e-waste fees are owed refunds if they were collected by said companies?
Every time we purchase an "electronic display", or device containing one, we pay a $6-10 fee. Not much per person, but I'm sure it adds up on the companies responsible for this.
If party A is using a service provided by party B that you think is immoral, what's the right way to go about stopping it? Well, at both ends. You try to convince party A not to use the service, and you try to convince party B not to provide it.
In this case, you're right, these countries shouldn't allow unsafe waste-processing, and shouldn't allow importing of waste unless it can be safely processed. That's one place to put pressure. However it's also perfectly legitimate to put pressure at the other end: US companies shouldn't be exporting waste except to safe processing facilities.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, the stuff starts in China....
Why cant we just send it back to China?
esp. considering that they are making all the profits, and taking jobs away from hard working Amerikans!
It's what has become the american way. A bit like when US government sends prisoners to countries that allows torture.
They should grind it all up and put it into the toys they ship back to the US.
They actually do that.
old news. here in the UK, there was an investigation a little while ago that re-cycling companies just sold off the 2nd hand systems and kit to developing nations to either use, or dismantle for parts and precious metals.
for example, the report found a stack of old computers from a hospital (as shown by their asset tags) that were being sold from the recycling dump in said developing nation, for $20 a time to anybody. about half the time, the drives were empty, but the investigators bought ten, and after going through the drives they found one with patient mediacal records, names, addresses, phone numbers, and even perscription details.
fantastic.
I don't think morals are that black and white. While on one hand it would be nice if we in the west disposed of our own garbage, I don't think it's our duty to keep anyone else from shooting themselves in the foot. Unless you want to go back to the old (and even worse) "mission to civilize" and "white man's burden" doctrines.
If China wants to import garbage for some quick cash, it's China's problem alone. They should fix their own laws, if they don't want it to happen.
There _are_ situations where the west did actual harm, including
- bribes (we practically created the 3'rd world kleptocracies, by making it so that taking a bribe from the western corporations is the most profitable thing one could do, better than any industry or commerce)
- military/CIA interventions
- economic pressures to make some countries destroy their own industry and agriculture (including occasionally to take the same good ol' right-wing measures in a crisis that that would turn a crisis into an all out depression, according to the economics we apply in the west)
Etc.
And for that we are rightfully hated.
But things that they do to themselves for a buck? Why would it be our business to stop them from doing that?
E.g., the west didn't hold anyone hostage to make them take our garbage. It's stuff that someone there figured out would be a good way to make some bucks. And is probably acclaimed as the great entrepreneur and one of the guys doing something for their economy there.
E.g., I don't think many western companies take _slaves_ in China, much less India. While I do find that running some of those sweatshops says something about the greedy fucks who moved there just for that, ultimately it's India's and China's job to decide whether that's ok with them or not. They _can_ give minimum wage and maximum hours per week laws if they want to, you know? If they'd rather get dollars than that, why should the west be the one to blame?
And again in most cases it's not the west who even runs those "slave labour" camps, but some local company who subcontracts for a western company. In most cases the western company can't even control what membranes go into their batteries (see incendiary batteries made in China that have a cheap non-working replacement for the membrane that was supposed to collapse and open the circuit when overheated), or what paint is used on their toys (lead-painted toys made in China ftw), or what glue goes into their beads that are supposed to be wet and stuck to a board and most kids will lick to get wet (replaced by some enterprising Chinese with a toxic and psychoactive glue.) What makes you think that the western company gets much more to say about how a Chinese boss treats Chinese employees at that company?
Or, as I was saying, are we back to the "mission to civilize" (China, India and everyone else) doctrine from the 19'th century?
Plus, even if the western corporations didn't directly subcontract to those, they'd still find ways to exploit each other just the same. Whether it's cheap pens or counterfeit watches or farming gold in WoW, they'll _still_ take advantage of the missing legislation to make each other work 90+ hour weeks for a pittance. E.g., I remember an article from some months ago about WoW gold farmers, and those guys were working 12 hour days in essentially a high-tech sweatshops. I don't think any western corporation made them do that. (Blizzard probably would rather they crawl somewhere and die, for example.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to play the bullshit card that we're some kind of great benefactors for giving them those crap jobs. I'm not _that_ deluded. But I _am_ saying that ultimately they do most of that exploitation to themselves, and they must find their own way and equilibrium point there. It's their own f-ing country, and it's mostly their own sociopaths not ours doing that to their workers or environment. It's not _our_ job to clean up _their_ act.
Blaming the west for that, and doubly so trying to
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
or maybe, just maybe these developing countries are going through the same development stages our nations did 100 years ago, when industry was low tech and highly polluting.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
May I invite people to look at the "Story of Stuff"? It's a very well done small movie about the waste economy...
http://storyofstuff.com/
Cheers,
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
have an excellent feature on ewaste this month for free!
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/high-tech-trash/carroll-text
When I read the headline about the USA 'dumping E-Waste' I thought that it would be a story about people in the USA sending SPAM all around the world.
Just saw a mini-documentary on this a couple days ago. Turns out many electronic parts are simply burned to get at the precious metals.
http://current.com/items/76355482_toxic_villages
Is there any way to get at the metals via shredding and then panning? Any material or mining engineers have any input?
With a turbo button and a left shift key, I can clean boot to DOS 6.0 so I can run Doom (after a few lowmem and xmms tweaks) at full speed!
Right. Like I'm the only one who used AOL floppy disks loaded with memory hacks to get Doom running. You all know you did the same thing when you were a kid and sneaker-netted Doom.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
That is a LOT of raw resources. There is oil, lead, silver, gold, copper, Lithium, etc. in these. There are a number of expensive raw earth materials. Sending it elsewhere is basically buying raw materials, mixing them, and then sending them to another country. Instead, we would do well to research what it takes to recycle these. If we can extract these for a low costs, then we can keep these material for future use. May sound hookie, but there will probably come a time when it will be expensive or difficult to get certain materials (say a cold war in which the items are located in russia).
This needs to be turned into an opportunity, not a problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YVSXRETml4
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
What, like MySpace?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Was I the only /.er that looked at the title and wondered how the contents of my computer's recycle bin was ending up overseas?
http://www.discussglobalwarming.com/blog has tons of EPA hypocrisies, including their largest puppet/liar, Al Gore and his antics.
Idiots.
I think my point had less to do with "helping" and more with the fact that it _is_ a sovereign nation, and it can fix thing itself by legal means, if it doesn't want our crap jobs or our garbage any more.
Look, we're not talking some puppet banana-republic government there. Both India and China are major nations, who had no problems thumbing their nose at the USA before. They're not doing this because the USA tells them to, because there's not much you can do to force China to do what you want it to. If China or India decide to pass some laws to protect their environment or fix minimum wages for their workers, there isn't much the USA or anyone else can do to stop them.
So let's stop blaming our collective selves there. China can solve it pretty much overnight, any time it wants to. If it doesn't want to, well, that's that.
Going above any beyond that, is already past the realm of "help" and more into the realm of "trying to impose your world view upon a foreign government".
The free market is ultimately just an optimization algorithm. The results it produces are largely a function of the constraints that are placed on it.
I.e., again, if China wants to fix it, it can simply change the constraints that apply over there. There isn't much that those large corporations can do to force any other result there.
China apparently chose a set where the result is that... well, as someone else's sig went, the invisible hand has its middle finger extended. I fail to see why would anyone put the blame squarely and solely on the western corporations, when essentially it's China's decision to compete in that way and under those conditions. Way I see it, they're at least accomplices there, or actually IMHO the main culprit.
The western corporations didn't do much more there than try to get the best prices. Which is how capitalism and the free market are supposed to work. If two companies offer to take your thrash, and one asks for half the sum, you pick that one. That's how that optimization works. It wasn't the corporations who couped governments there to make someone burn our plastics. (God knows there was enough of that in other places, but none of us couped China lately.) It was someone from that country which came and said, basically, "hey, we can take your thrash for half the price these other guys ask for." It seems to me like the blame lies mostly with them, then. I'm not saying that the west doesn't share _some_ share of the blame there, but I don't see it as the main share any way I want to look at it.
I never claimed that legal is right, so we can even aggree there. All I'm saying is that China should fix its own damned laws. If legal != right, then you change what is legal. As I was saying, we're talking about a major sovereign nation, not about some muppet government with no choice but to nod.
Except that never worked that way. The people currently benefiting from the status quo, will invariably either
A) try to maintain the status quo, or
B) come up with some surrealistic mis-conception about what those poor proletars actually need.
You can find examples of both either in the same 19'th century I've mentioned before. History is full
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Most of the large and even not so large "recycling" companies in the US are now owned by the Chinese. In addition to shipping e-waste back to China for processing, they are also behind the large stolen copper wire/plumbing industry that's sprung up in the past 3 years.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I always dump my e-waste into /dev/null, but I guess that's just me.
> A bit like when US government sends prisoners to countries that allows torture.
You mean like when US government sends prisoners to the USA ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Anticorporate socialist environmentalist types really are a bunch of whiners. Know what would happen if these things weren't shipped to third-world countries to be destructively recycled? They'd be dumped in landfills, where they'd cause relatively little problem. It just isn't economically feasible (nor even technically feasible in many cases) to cleanly deconstruct them for their raw materials. And in the US you can't do the destructive recycling. So, choose -- do you want recycling, or do you want clean disposal processes? Or would you rather take option C, whine about the evil US and evil corporations, and say we shouldn't be using electronics at all until we've figured out how to turn them back into sand, oil, and metal without any byproducts?
I heard Bush had that razed during his first term to make way for a Chick-Fil-A.
Well, I guess you can't stop Progress...
Well, then it seems to me that democracy is the first thing that should be fixed there. In fact, the only thing. The rest will then follow, or not, depending on whether the people like it that way or not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So does that mean the old report on "greenness" of various tech companies is wrong? I remember when this came out, and greenpeace merely looked at the companies policies, not what they actually did. Now it looks like the companies were lying. Biiig surprise. Glad I didn't follow that advice.
... that downgrad... er, I mean upgrading to the new Micro$oft Operating system will make more chinese and Indian children sick because of the much more powerful hardware requirements that the worlds consumers and businesses will be forced to purchase? Even though their existing hardware still works fine for all practical purposes? Me thinks Steve Ballmer doesn't consider such things as very important. What a shame.
Government Accountability Office? Really?
(SMACK)
tards
Yep. Goes back to where it came from. If they made things out of a green materials, we wouldn't have to return it to them. It is also Darwinism.
We ship it off to countries with no safety standards where people are destitute enough to take ANY KIND OF WORK... they probably know that their cancer risk is sky high... but they have families to feed... sort of like the coal miners who went into the mines because that was the best option they felt they had...
It's convenient for us to sweep the problem under the carpet... so under the carpet it goes.
And you can bet that someone in each of those countries is making a bundle hiring people to cook PCB boards down to their base components. Yeah capitalism!
This article is preposterous. We don't dump e-waste in China, they buy it from us!
They love it, they recycle that stuff and ship it back to us in products they make.
China used to buy computer monitors from us by the millions, they would take them apart, sort the chassis by brand and model, make a special board to run it when they had enough the same and those would be the new TV sets at Walmart. Recycled tubes.
Today they sort the plastic by color, regrind it and mold more plastic items.
They sort the screws by size and reuse them.
They unsolder memory and other chips and resolder them on new boards as needed.
It's all ingenious, really.
The allegation that we are dumping e-waste is absurd.
I have seen all this and talked to the Chinese guys who buy those containers here in the US for their cohorts in China to recycle.
This is what I was told. And they are looking for more and more containers to use for raw material.
Without China we'd really have an e-waste problem. Fortunately we don't because of their clever activities.
Reuse-recycle! We're doing it. China is helping us and themselves.
It takes much less energy, effort and causes much less pollution reusing than making new raw materials.
.
How do you get to be CEO of a large corporation - which is really just a closed system of interlocking parts - and be incapable of understanding that the Earth itself is a closed system? How can a CEO not understand that just because he or she puts something poisonous way over there, it does not obligate the Earth and natural forces to keep it way over there?
Maybe we should start using terms that CEOs can understand:
Think of pollution like you would that letter from your largest customer informing you that they are thinking about dumping you. If you don't keep it safely locked up, before long it is all over the corporation, and then all over Wall Street, and the next thing you know, your accumulated shares are worth 90% less - and your future is uncertain at best. Only with pollution, your carelessness forces others to share your uncertain future.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
TALKING about?
This kind of manufacturing and e-waste-dumping deserves NOTHING less than the most harsh, condemning, excoriating, almost-execution-mandating response. (Maybe the smartest people need to stop suggesting and start holding GUNS to the head of those who approve or scheme up manufacturing with no per-product materials-class recycling conduit...?) It's no accident or result of ignorance that inventors and designers in industrialized countries fail to design a recycling channel into their products' manufacturing, or that many governments don't mandate it, even at the increased cost of goods.
The way I see it is akin to 9/11 (and no, unlike what the wankers in DC say on TV, 9/11 is NOT about being jealous of us: it's mostly revenge and a wake-up call to conducts PAST, not about materialism... it's supposed to humiliate and change behavior, not wipe us out, but we don't seem to be heeding the lesson...): .... But, decades of screwing around abroad (militarily, politically, economically, etc.) instead of cleaning house at home is not much different than e-waste dumping products to India, Somalia, China and other places. For OUR immediate-gratification benefit, untold thousands die daily, and millions in a few years due to over production (yeh, i know a tiny bit about scale and maximum profits/minimal materials), less than stellar consumptions than planned, and ultimate waste disposal rather than fixing of the goods, others die. This karma will or should come back home to roost at the foot of any country (and, no, i'm not somehow absolving China's leadership woes, either) that is blase or careless about the impact.
There needs to be a national mandate to shut down ALL new inventions manufacturing if there is no globally-acceptable recycling conduit. If I draw or print, my papers can be recycled if no one wants them later. If if design CD holders, or tire rims, or medical equipment that is for few uses or one-time use, and it's contaminated beyond the typical chemicals, and it's likely to end up in a landfill, or in a sewer, the my products should be banned.
I BUY electronics, books, and other items which i expect to last me 5-10 years, and I take it on FAITH that our "manufacturing community" is concurrently strategising to recover and reintegrate the most offensive materials into new products. But, having lead, zinc, germanium, arsenic, cyanide-laden and other items -- even ship hulls with fuel and paint content that all end up smoldering, blackening skies, and poisoning fisheries... well, that is just plain reprehensible and needs to be taken in hand
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
There are a number of States in the U.S. that require recycling of normal goods (e.g. aluminum cans, etc.). Some of them truly do recycle the stuff; while a few others (e.g. Michigan) put up a facade about the recycling - you can get a recycling bin and pay another $4/billing period for it, and even have to be careful of what you put in it - just to take it and throw it in the landfill anyway.
So, either they are actually recycling it, or they are not. No two bits about it.
I'm not saying they shouldn't do their best to do it safely - they should - but if they are actually recycling it good. With the EPA regulations in the U.S. it makes some things darn near impossible to do, and this might be how those companies are handling it. Not saying its right, but it might also be the only solution available.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Thank you, GrpA! You said more succinctly and less belligerently what i had said. But, i think my violence/9/11 allusions are going to be manifested upon the US in under 5 years. This kind of careless manufacturing and fake-green-standards trumpet-blaring cannot go on forever.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Am I the only one who is surprised to learn that the GAO still retains sufficient autonomy to conduct studies like this and issue reports critical of government policy?
Given the way the Bush administration has ruthlessly turned all the other agencies into organizations of yes-men who exist only to support Bush policies, this is pretty surprising.
Of course, the Right's response to this report will be outrage - not at the environmental travesty, but at the GAO's audacity - followed by a demand that the GAO be shut down. Hear no evil, see no evil; criticism of the government must not be allowed.
(Also, though it's great that the GAO still has some power, it's rather tragic that the GAO has to call out the EPA on environmental abuses.)
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
What's actually happening is that companies in those countries are BUYING the waste from us, and THEY are paying to get it shipped there. Once it's there, they sort through for anything valuable, and dump the rest.
WE are not doing the dumping. If the governments in those countries don't want dumping, they need to crack down on their local companies that are doing it. However, they can't get international publicity and paint the US as the bad guys in the situation if they do that.
I hope that was a joke anyway.
The poisoning from burning circuit boards isn't much worse than the poisoning from dissolving them with acid.
Think of all the mortgages we're bailing out by not spending those recycling taxes on recycling.
They'll keep voting for more recycling taxes until they're actually used for recycling.
I thought that we had passed the era when all words looked cooler by prefixing them with "e-" a long time ago. In this case it doesn't just look silly, it also makes it very ambiguous.
There is an area at least twice the size of Texas full of rubbish floating just below the surface of the Pacific...
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html
This is a timely reminder that we should not forget there is garbage covering an area twice the size of the US floating just under the surface of the Pacific. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-garbage-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html
I'm skeptical that environmental damage is really the primary export here. And that it's the only sinister one. My local landfill (Brunswick, Maine, US) charges for almost every kind of trash except e-trash, which they accept for free, off to the side in a special warehouse. I speculate someone, somewhere must be paying them for it. Picture some scrappy, third-world geek lord of the junkyard, who frankensteins together usable stuff. Now I'd love to hear his story. It's not just motherboards and memory chips and material tangibles he has to work with is it? There must be the occasional windfall from unerased hard drives.
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
... will export computers. What is needed is for industry to set up rules which reform and raise the export standards, a la "Fair Trade Coffee". WR3A.org is one such group, UNCTAD is another. Unfortunately, the ugly pictures of junk exports scare ethical suppliers out of the export marketplace. Smugglers fill the demand and make money and mix in garbage units (buy one, get one 'free'). You can learn more about it by watching the movie "Traffic" than you can by reading the press (which is all over the GAO report as of this morning).
Gently reply