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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."
The I'm-not-the-only-one-who-does-it excuse is just a shame.
It isn't countries per se that are involved in importing used electronics and taking them apart in an unsafe manner. Rather, it is a bunch of brokers and recyclers.
From the report:
State-of-the-art facilities that can safely dismantle CRTs and other electronic gadgets:
1 Umicore (Belgium)
2 Samsung Corning (Malaysia)
Unsafe dismantling/recycling goes on largely in South-east Asia and parts of West Africa. The following countries are mentioned:
- Cambodia
- China
- India
- Indonesia
- Nigeria
- Senegal
Made in China, dumped in China. What's the big deal?
You mean taking advantage of a situation removes all blame from you? You really think the US companies are dumping this waste without knowing full well what will happen to it? I doubt it.
Then again, we could have another Mattel-lead-paint situation, where they got it done for cheap overseas, without fully looking in to how bad the situation really was.
I can't speak for other countries, or even other provinces, but Alberta, Canada, adds a tax on to all major electronic devices (Laptops, desktops), which covers their recycling at the end of the product's life.
I am not testifying as to how good these programs work though, as I've never seen them in action.
The US should however be responsible for the regulation of their own companies, ensuring that those companies correctly follow the law of their own country, and ensuring that those same companies do not attempt to deceive the general public.
Nice try.
Its the USA's waste, it is ultimately the USA's hands that are dirty. (metaphorically of course, the poor B'Stards that get trash dumped on their doorstep are obviously going to have dirty hands literally)
This is yet another example of green washing and corporates (in this case US ones) flushing our environment down the toilet for their own short term gain.
However, it is not just the US that engages in this crap. Lots of others do also! Even here in "green NZ", there are instances of "recycling" companies shipping recycling overseas to the more dodgy chinese outlets.
disclaimer: it appears that the majority of ours do the right thing however. (One retail chain even does it FOR FREE! Not to mention E-day www.eday.org.nz )
And these filthy buggers will moan and complain when regulation is forced upon them to stop being little piglets. Sheesh.
Makes one really feel sorry for mother nature to be honest.
So it's okay for me to kick your little brother as longs as you say it's okay?
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 [...]."
That sounds great. Last I heard the US was not Utopia though. US (and other countries companies) will continue to attempt extracting water from stone and pushing the limits of what they can get away with. As my boss said to me once: "Don't worry what's 'right', this is the way it's done.
Despite this I agree with you; I am becoming a cynic as I age. Although, depsite being a cynic, I can still *personally* choose to choose right from wrong.
Heh... He said "dumping" heh heh.
Anything and Everything about the Net
Recycling pays back money, otherwise they'd dump the stuff in the middle of the ocean instead of going all the way to China.
Sure it pays back money. If you're recycling something that is rich enough in certain materials. Otherwise it isn't worth it in many cases.
Now of course if it isn't cost efficient for you to recycle something, then it may well be that someone in a country where people work for pennies an hour and there are no meddlesome regulators can make a profit off of the recycling process.
So you sell the junk to them and they recycle it. You make money, they make money, the workers even make some money. A win, win situation for all. Unless you want to get all picky and start complaining about the health of the workers and possible environmental damage.
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.
So we see countries competing on price of their environment. I understand that one may have ethical problems with the effects, but isn't the current capitalist dogma that corporations must behave unethically if that improves the short term stock price?
So we see countries competing on price of their environment.
Their?
If you wait long enough (centuries, if necessary), this turns into 'ours' quite suddenly.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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
Makes one really feel sorry for mother nature to be honest.
On principle, I am with you. However, you may adopt the view that it is probably not a big problem for the planet to survive a couple of million years of bad influence from humanity.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
"This is yet another example of green washing and corporates (in this case US ones) flushing our environment down the toilet for their own short term gain."
Yes. The west has cleaned up it's act over the last few decades but the illusion breaks down when you realise much of that has been achived by throwing it over an international fence. In general the EU/AU/NZ have slightly better laws to deal with this kind of thing. What I find strange about the US is there seems to be a much larger proportion of the general population who are outright hostile to environmentalists. These people (and we have them here in Oz aswell - so untwist those patriotic nickers), also seem to rant about "UN totalitairianisim", "intellectual elitisim" and "freedom".
Personally I want to restict the the "freedom" to pillage and plunder, not because I grew up in the 60-70's (when totalitarians really were a big problem), but because I grew up surrounded by farms and can appreciate where our food comes from. The farms and surrounding bush have all but dissapeared under the sprawling suburbs of a city famous the world over for looking green from the window of a passanger jet.
I selfishly want enough arable land with a stable enough climate to feed myself, my kids, and from March next year my grandkid(s). I want my offspring to experience and appreciate both the benifits of the industrial revolution AND the awesome natural wonders in this country and elsewhere. Pretending we are green by denying we are both culpable in, and affected by, (say) West Papua or the Amazon is the height of "elitisim" that will come back to bite EVERYONE on the arse and hard!
I understand the world is a messy place and there is always a trade-off, but I think the "freedom" to blatantly pillage and plunder are "rights" that should be denied to all players in a globalised economy, those "rights" are as distastefull to me as the "freedom" to trade slaves.
So come on and hit me without hiding behind an anonymous troll, who thinks enviromentalists are the scum of the earth and why?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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?
You may also realise that WE may not be around to enjoy it in a few centuries.
I am 100% sure the planet/universe will be around for a long time to come.
I should add that my comments on "doing the right thing" were ONLY for recycling efforts. Most NZ companies throw out the trash randomly like everybody else in the world.
The main point was about greenwashing and fake-recycling.
Heard an interesting speaker recently on developing products from cradle to cradle and near 100% recycling. I believe they are starting the initiatives in Sweden. (god I love Sweden...)
ref:
http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/cradle-to-cradle-design
One of his main comments was on how future generations will look down on our era as a sockingly wasteful society. Sort of how we look down on medievil times and their beliefs and way of life.
Ah, like the Chinese proverb states, "It's patriotic to screw foreigners." Especially when the Chinese get off scot-free and USA gets the blame once again.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And how often do you suppose your extremely unlikely sounding hypothetical scenario actually occurs ?
We have been hearing about this problem in the UK for quite a while now where even various councils who were supposed to recyling goods have been caught simply shipping them to India to be dumped in a field. In every case which I've heard reported the entity responsible for employing the recycling firm were completely aware of what was actually happening but assumed that no one would either care or find out and it would be much cheaper.
I'm not going to disagree. But I'll add that it's ironic that the west decries and bemoans the lack of human rights in these "slave" countries, but then actively participates in the denial of those rights.
It is a human right to have clean water and not be poisoned by toxic chemicals, especially by those that are specifically manufactured for human use. It's just two faced to complain about Chinas human rights record and then deliberately use them to a) produce shit cheaply (keeping the labourers poor) and b) export the waste back to them to suffer the consequences of that cheapness.
And because they are poor they have no option other than "thank you sir, may I have another". Colour me disgusted.
There is such a thing as moral leadership.
Thankfully, this situation cannot continue for much longer, as we are running out of places to relocate our dirty habits to. As the third world gets more of our business, they also get more of our money, and then they start demanding their rights. So we move to less demanding countries. That list of alternatives is dwindling, so IMHO, we ought to be biting the bullet now, and cleaning up our act before we are forced to.
Not only "capitalist dogma" but the obligation to shareholders and stock price is a legal one.
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
Learn to read BETWEEN THE LINES, idiot. USA is rich, Africa is poor & being exploited. Figure it out for yourself & dont expect everything spelt out for you.
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?
Yes, because the "poor B'Stards that get trash dumped on their doorstep" are too stupid to understand what is going on. Fuck you.
"isn't the current capitalist dogma that corporations must behave unethically if that improves the short term stock price?"
I believe this is more the domain of the misinformed. Maybe you should go back to ideology school, and listen to a lecturer who actually is a capitalist, rather than go to the "Capitalism As Interpreted By Marxists" ones?
"Capitalism" as an ideology is quite like "socialism" as an ideology - it is immensely broad. Socialism does in my view not provide a clear answer to e.g. "Should we have a United Nations", and neither does Capitalism. You will naturally find people who profess to be either Capitalists or Socialists (without being strongly challenged as being something else) and who profess views on that, in either direction.
To take it to the extreme you take it is like saying "Patriotism involves placing a high value on your country, ipso facto patriots say that you should kill and dissect ten million children in poor countries and make the organs into an organ bank for the leaders of your own country. Not to do so is not patriotic." Exaggeration and hyperbole does not make for a good discussion.
On the specific subject - like Patriotism does not say anything about dissecting babies, Capitalism does not say anything about behaving unethically. Google is not behaving "uncapitalistically" for failing to sell person tracking services in every country where the law allows them to - they have simply chosen not to do it. Another element which the discussion here has failed to touch on - if people work in hazardous ways to dismantle electronics and ships, it's probably because they would not afford food or clothing for themself and their families otherwise. Which has to do with a lot of issues again, population size being one of them.
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.
Perhaps China is seeing this as a new, and novel way to help control their (over)population?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No freaking way.
There is no obligation to shareholders whatsoever apart from the "you can get voted of the board" one.
Many companies have made decisions to not go for pure maximum cash, but take other things into concideration as well.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
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
Yeah, but shareholders can and have successfully argued that management did not put their priorities, as owners, high enough - receiving compensation. Not only is that a right enshrined in law, common law has tested it quite a few times.
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?
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.
Government Accountability Office? Really?
(SMACK)
tards
My mum was telling me about something like this that happened in ireland a few months (maybe a year) ago. A recycling company in the south was literally driving the crap to the north and dumping it in landfills.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Yeah, but I'm a shareholder of companies too, and I don't like companies that think short term.
Not all shareholders think short term.
A company's management can choose to attract different shareholders to hold their stock - and even say so publicly.
If you keep focusing on rewarding short term shareholders, naturally you will end up having a lot of short termers holding your stock.
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.
.
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"
And this happened to who? Anyone you can name? Or is it just a fairy tale you made up so you can absolve yourself of all responsibility? In reality, the American company only wants two things: a certificate stating the waste was disposed of legally, and a cheap price. What actually happens to the waste, they care as little as you evidently do.
Especially when the Chinese get off scot-free and USA gets the blame once again.
Excause me? The Chinese who are dying of cancer and poisoned in numerous ways are getting off "scot-free"? The farmers whose crops are contaminated? How dare they complain. Time for some regime change, hey?
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.
So come on and hit me without hiding behind an anonymous troll, who thinks enviromentalists are the scum of the earth and why?
People think that way because everyone has their own definition of "environmentalist." I consider myself an environmentalist. But, others don't consider conservationists as environmentalists, or think only Greenpeace terrorists are environmentalists, or maintain any number of skewed and biased misconceptions.
The problem is that environmentalism of all stripes is largely political and has its share of hypocrisy. The Sierra club has oil wells on their nature preserves, Al Gore has a $4k/month electric bill, and everybody flies and drives. It's easy to scorn hypocrisy and disregard any of the larger ideals.
I would personally stop short at "scum of the earth," but some people who label themselves environmentalists are misguided. You say you know where food comes from - I do, too. Both of my parents, and their parents, and their parents unto the time when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sundays, were farmers.
But, food comes from a store. You'll say, "Wait, you idiot! Someone has to grow it!" But, if the store has food, somebody somewhere is growing it. If the food is inexpensive, it's an indicator that a lot of somebodies somewhere are growing it. The miracle of the modern era is that farms are more productive - less land feeds more people - and that food can be shipped almost anywhere.
The lack of green space is simply a side effect of A) existing land being used more efficiently and B) food being grown elsewhere, where it's more productive to do so. No pillaging and plundering involved, unless you count the misguided who label themselves as protectionists/intellectuals/whatever who lock the third world out of our marekts with tariffs.
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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.
Recycling of Ewaste is profitable, both in America and the third world.
The problem, speaking as someone who works in the industry, is one of trust and profitability. If a company comes to you and says they'll dispose of your equipment you might as how, and for how much.
If they say "recycle it!" you feel good inside, but there's no guarantee that any of that work is done domestically, that it isn't merely loaded in a container and exported. Even better, if it stays in the US you have no guarantee that it isn't going to done by prison laborers in conditions that are every bit as bad as workers in third world countries. (Thankfully the largest facility in America using prison labor was just shut down this year)
You can bet that either of those options brings the bottom line quite a bit lower and still allows your crooked salesman to say that you're doing the environmentally responsible thing. Remember, there aren't that many states that outlaw simply throwing it in the trash, although the the number is growing.
I think you missed the point of the comment about the Chinese getting of scot-free.
The scale of these electronics dumps in China defies imagination if you haven't seen them for yourself. This isn't some back ally industry that the Chinese government couldn't stop overnight if they had any mindset to do so. I'd argue that the Chinese government is just as culpable for allowing their country being a dumping ground for hazardous waste as the countries that send it are.
Is it wrong to export the waste? You bet, I work for a recycling company that doesn't, that regularly has to compete with companies with much lower overhead because they do, I'd be a lot better off if it wasn't legal, but until countries stop accepting it (and many countries particularly in Africa are banning the importation of non-functional electronics) is the blame really one sided?
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.
What are the other countries doing accepting the waste? USA shouldn't be responsible for other countries' not acting responsibly.
I don't see why this was marked Troll.
The poster asks a perfectly valid question. Why should we in the United States be held to account because countries such as India and China aren't disposing of waste correctly?
They are taking responsibility for it by accepting money. What they do with it is really their problem at that point.
The old saying "You bought the ticket, now ride the ride" comes to mind.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Can you back this up? I have been studying this market for some time now, and the bottom line is that scrap is only going for $140 a ton, while copper goes for roughly $3 a pound. You do the math. That indicates to me that it is pretty expensive to get the valuable materials out, either in sheer environmental cost or expensive machinery cost. I've been toying with the idea of making electronic recycling sustainable but haven't found a solution yet. Care to share your experience?
zosxavius photography
You mean taking advantage of a situation removes all blame from you? You really think the US companies are dumping this waste without knowing full well what will happen to it? I doubt it.
Then again, we could have another Mattel-lead-paint situation, where they got it done for cheap overseas, without fully looking in to how bad the situation really was.
Because people like you and me LIKE cheap shit.
I shop at WalMart because it is CHEAP.
They (the companies) would say it isn't their responsibility to do the Chinese Governments job of overseeing the enforcement of their own laws regarding the environment.
You know what, I would kinda argue the same thing.
Who am I to NOT buy from someone in China if the product looks exactly the same as one I'm currently buying from Canada, accept is cheaper.
NOW! IF the Chinese product is shown to be a danger (such as being tainted with lead, or plastic, etc.), then I have a VERY GOOD reason to go back to buying the more expensive product (higher quality).
But, without a good reason, cheap will almost always rate higher than non-cheap.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
What are the other countries doing accepting the waste?
I'll tell you what. I read a very long article in a magazine published several months ago about this (sorry, can't remember the name right now). People in those countries (in the case of the article I read, it was a couple of African countries) allow this to happen so they can sift through the junk and melt down the valuable metals. Older computers contain gold, many contain silver, they even melt down and sell the copper. And cellphones have small amounts of columbium and tantalite, rare and expensive minerals. So landfills of technological waste are scattered around Africa, where small children work for pennies a day tearing apart electronics and melting down circuitry to get the raw valuable metals. This process fills the air with lead smoke and the large amounts of mercury in the older CRT monitors eventually find their way into the nearby ocean. The closest beach is known (in whatever language they speak there) as Trash Beach. Seriously, the article had some pictures and they weren't exaggerating. I just wish I could link to it.
There's more. Many of these computers come from hospitals and businesses, and still contain records for hundreds of patients, clients, customers, etc. These hard drives are taken out and sold to whoever will pay for them, and are consequently a major source of fraud from Africa.
Many countries are guilty of dumping this stuff in Africa, although, according to the article I read, the U.S. and U.K. contributed most.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
I certainly did. On its face it's completely wrong.
I'd argue that the Chinese government is just as culpable
True. That is a quite different subject, though.
The problem is using "the Chinese" to refer to the businessmen who make money from dumping, the bureaucrats who ignore the problems or write it off as a necessary cost; the workers who destroy their health to make a few dollars, the local people whose land is poisoned. All are "Chinese". Some of them may be considered to "get off scot free". Others are "culpable". Others are suffering terrible conseqences. It's wrong to just say that "China" is getting what it deserves. Equally it's wrong to put all the blame on western businesses.
where small children work for pennies a day tearing apart electronics and melting down circuitry to get the raw valuable metals
Yes, do it for the children. My guess is that if it weren't for the computers, people will find some other way to exploit poor children and pollute the beaches in these countries. In fact, I'm fairly confident the beaches were industrial waste sites before the computers got there.
Just callin' it like I see it.
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 work for a company that does exactly that, and competes with quite a few others who do the same, all of them, to the best of my knowledge, pretty profitable.
You take a number like $3 a pound for copper, consider that a CRT monitor has about 1-2lbs of copper in it. Precious boards (the kind you'd find in PC's, usually green) can market close to $4 a pound, something like ceramic processors can be in the $20-$40 per pound range. There's obviously money to be made, it's just a matter of whether your separation of these commodities is efficient enough to cover labor and logistics costs. Manual separation (read: guys with tools) is far more efficient at extracting well sorted and graded commodities at the cost of higher overhead cost. Mechanical separation (shredding) has been the growing trend in the industry that has much lower operating costs in the long run weighed against lower output and higher initial cost, as well as added problems with making sure no one throws something stupid in the machine.
Either way is profitable, but that's not the end of it, because that's assuming that you took all this equipment for free. If you charge the customer a fee associated with the collection and disposal of the equipment you can easily make back whatever commodity value didn't cover and more. There's also a large market for asset management, ie being able to provide the customer with a detailed inventory of their hardware because they were never able to do it themselves.
We take it one step further though, and it doesn't really fall under the topic of this article, but if you were curious. Many companies refresh their systems on a normal 2-4 year cycles, this mean that at this point we're being paid to take away equipment like 2-3ghz P4 computers, which with pretty minimal effort and an assurance of data security can be resold for pure profit. The market here is a little questionable for the future due to the ever dropping price of new PC hardware but it's still a pretty stable cash flow.
You might be a little late to the market though, besides smaller independently owned companies like the one I work for, IBM, Dell, and HP all have their own electronics recycling and refurbishing operations.
Nice try, you just left out the word "Nigger." We all know you wanted to put it in, I'm curious why you didn't.
Africa isn't all poor some of the most resource rich areas in the world are located in Africa. If they could elect a reasonable government, one which wasn't corrupt they'd have few problems.
"The miracle of the modern era is that farms are more productive - less land feeds more people -"
Yes I agree and at the global level there is more food available today that during the 60's & 70's when Chairman Mao was screwing China deeper and deeper into famine. However I don't think that can last indenfinitely, N. Hemisphere fisheries have collapsed one after the other since the 80's and here in Australia we have a problem mixing modern (over)farming methods with shifting weather patterns. When you cut the output of the world's 4th largest grain exporter in half for 8 out of the last 10 years, not only do Aussies pay a few more cents for bread but people in Hati and elsewhere starting having food riots.
Of course the "elephant in the room" is population, I'm 50 and there are now over twice as many people on the planet as when I was born. I have no idea how to humanely "fix" that.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
It's not a hypothetical scenario, it is daily life for a foreign businessman in China. The situation is as I describe. See http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20051029_2.htm for a starter.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
... 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).
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