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The Scope of US E-Waste
theodp writes "Every day, Americans toss out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the US garbage stream. A lot of the world's e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15" computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. Guiyu's willingness to deal with lead, mercury and other toxic materials generates $75 million a year for the village, but as a result. Guiyu is slowly poisoning itself with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. The village experiences elevated rates of miscarriages, and its children suffer from an extremely high rate of lead poisoning. TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the next time you're ready to toss a gizmo."
What's wrong with you people?
This lead is then formed into figurines, painted, and sold as toys.
That's actually inline with most estimates that I've seen. Remember a CRT will often times weigh 20lbs or more and it's not that big of a box. Lead is something that's been used for quite a while for shielding radiation.
But, as for the story, it's China's fault for not enforcing their own regulations. There is now some recognition that it needs to be done responsibly, but assuming that it's the US' fault for not enforcing Chinese environmental legislation is kind of odd. Really the best thing would be for people to get information through ban.org.
Other than that my home state of WA just officially opened up manufacturer sponsored recycling sites. The only complaint that I've got about it is that there wasn't a provision requiring compliance with the Basel Convention. Hopefully there'll be enough transparency that we know whether or not a site is.
Most of that 7 lbs of lead is in the glass (as an x-ray shield). The summary is wrong to imply that this lead can be recovered by heating, just like circuit board lead.
China hasn't been accepting E-Waste for at least 18 months. Now it goes mostly to West Africa.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Hi,
I am a voluntary sys admin for a mental health charity, Contact, http://www.contactmorpeth.org.uk/
We take in local donations of unwanted PCs, refurbish them and give them away to people with mental health problems, their children or their carers. Some people have told me that their free PC was a life changing event (once they'd got broadband working).
Surely in America you'd be able to start up a similar scheme for charitable donations?
HTH,
Ian
Cell providers try to get used phones off the market by setting up charity drop boxes for women's shelters with the idea being that the phones actually go to the shelters. In actual fact the phones get dumped overseas, and the charity receives a pittance for use of their name on the side of the box. Cell providers benefit because this forces people to but new phones which are tied to contracts.
There are legit phones for shelters programs, but if it says something like "only put the phone in the box, not the charger" then the phones will just end up overseas, not reused.
If they're generating millions from e-waste we throw away then why is it the wests fault that they are polluting themselves?
If they dealt with the waste in a responsible manner and took even basic precautions then they wouldn't be polluting their own villages.
Guiyu's willingness to deal with lead, mercury and other toxic materials...
There's the problem. Don't do that.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
A quick Google puts the number of US cell phone users in 2005 at 208 million. A number of cell providers will give you a "free" phone every two years, and many people take advantage of that. I'd guess the cell phone number is plausible if you assume slightly less than 50% turn over rate per year and include growth in the cell phone market since the 2005 numbers were published.
I sort of gagged on the number 350,000 cell phones (130,000) computers a day? But it makes sense. in 2005 a survey found 69% of americans had cell phones. That's about 250 million users. So if mean replacement time is 2 years, that's 342K a day! Computer's last longer aparently to account for the lower discard number.
However the 7 pounds of lead in a 15 pound computer is complete BS. First most CRTs weigh about 30 pounds so this 15 pound number is perverse. If we assume that only referes to the computer itself and not the CRT we can still estimate the amount of lead using numbers from various studies:
According to this report 98% of the lead attributed to computers is in the CRT glass. (interesting the report also notes that 75% of CRTs are stored not recycled). However for a 15 pound computer system, only slightly more than half of that is the CRT. And CRT's are not made of 90% lead.
indeed this pdf article determiened that nearly all the lead in a CRT is not in the heavy panel portion but is in fact in the neck and frit seals.
most of the lead however is bound up. the leachable lead is still considerable however.
The actual amount of lead in a 27 pound CRT (19% screen) is 2.2 or less than 10%. If CRT's have 90% of the lead in a computer system then a computer is about 1% of it's weight in lead. so a 15 pound computer ought ot have about 0.15 pounds of lead not 7 pounds.
the article is BS.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We can't get but a handful of states in the US to put deposits on bottles, much less give people incentives to actually recycle their electronics. Put a damn $50 deposit/tax on new computer sales, and THEN maybe you'll have people recycling. Hell, we have core fees on automotive parts, why not electronics?
Laws and fines rarely push people to do this type of thing, and forget the "think of the children" ads. People get off their ass and do something when it benefits them directly, and nothing speaks louder than cash in hand.
TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the next time you're ready to toss a gizmo.
Even better: unless it really is broken beyond repair, re-use your old stuff or give it to someone who still can get use out of it. Freecycle what you can, recycle the rest, and throw away as little as possible.
PS! Read my tagline! ;-)
"Good news, everyone!"
While I've not been to China, everything I've read leads me to believe that China can't control what's happening. They simply don't have established institutions like the EPA and the regulatory overhead that we accept as normal for business operation in the West. Want to open a manufacturing plant somewhere? Just do it. Pay off the local party chief and set it up. Dump your waste into the local river.
That's why melamine, lead, and God knows what else ends up in food and toys.. because there's nobody to go inspect the plants and see just what it is they're doing. All the central government can do when a scandal breaks is take a bunch of guys, put them up against the wall, and hope everyone else takes note.
So, yes, while it is undeniably China's fault for not having a better handle on what's going on inside their borders, it will take years and years before they have the systems in place to be able to do anything about it.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
There are a lot of people who actually want this stuff, and they are willing to pay the cost of shipping/handling to get it. I've asked a few of them: Why do you want an old gadget?
(1) "I need a PC that I can experiment upon."
(2) "I am a collector of old electronics."
(3) "My camcorder broke and I need a new magnetic head to fix it."
(4) "I need a cheap laptop for typing notes."
And on and on and on. Like the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Rather than toss your old gadgets in the junk, sell it on ebay for 99 cents + shipping. Somebody will buy it. Recyle.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
, would that increase costs for shipping the waste there?
Not really, the stuff is inert until you start disassembling and burning stuff. What it would do is increase the cost such that Guiyu wouldn't be making so much profit selling the resulting materials. Though substantial infrastructure upgrades(IE a PROPER recycling facility) would be more efficient, but would take decades or more to return on the investment.
ecyclers would probably look for another poor nation to accept the waste
why are these ecycler moving the waste to begin with?
Let's say I'm a recycling collection facility. Doesn't matter what I take. I collect various recyclable materials, from batteries to aluminum cans to paper to whole computers and refrigerators. I don't actually recycle anything myself. What I do is collect and sort the stuff. When I have around a semi-load of it, I get on the market for this stuff, keeping in mind shipping costs, and sell it to the highest bidder(IE who's willing to pay me the most), or to the lowest for stuff where I have to pay for them to take it.
International shipping is cheap - especially since with the trade balance ships are normally quite a bit lighter on their way back to china. So Guiyu wins the bids and gets the stuff because their 'processing' is extremely cheap and they gain enough money from the resulting materials to make a profit.
then the material would stay where it started its life cycle as waste. how would it be dealt with then?
1. If it's still economically viable to recycle in a less polluting manner, then it'll get recycled
2. If the host nation STILL insists it be recycled, you'll see recycling fees tacked on to either the purchase or disposal end to deal with the added expense. Like car tires here in the USA.
3. If they don't, it'll be placed in a landfill until an economical method to recycle it comes along(or raw material expenses goes up) making it profitable to dig it out of the landfill.
I don't read AC A human right
You can't be serious? Do you really think the people working with this toxic waste know the dangers? I'm sure their government does but China isn't exactly a free society.
Time makes more converts than reason
> TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the
> next time you're ready to toss a gizmo.
I guess TIME doesn't watch 60 minutes.
'"This is a photograph from your yard, the Executive Recycling yard," Pelley told Richter, showing him a photo we'd taken of a shipping container in his yard. "We followed this container to Hong Kong."'
Soon the dollar won't buy anything, let alone electronics. I wouldn't worry about it.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Still, I'll note that they go on about this being the 'fastest growing part of the US waste stream'. First, I imagine that it's the fastest growing part of the WORLD's waste stream. Ever considered how many cellphones China has? While yes, 350k cell phones might be tossed every day, and this seems a lot, it's scare tactics. First, the growth is unsustainable. Much longer and you'd have to assume either everybody starts carrying multiple phones or starts disposing of them faster. Not incredibly likely. After all, cellphones are starting to reach the point where they already do everything people want, so they won't necessarily trade out every couple years, plus they've improved battery technology substantially - I'd imagine that a large number of replacement cell phones were because the battery wasn't lasting very long anymore.
Second, consider appliances. How many cell phones does it take to equal a fridge? Figure a fridge lasts 20 years. That means with a 2 year lifespan for cellphones, you'd only toss 10 cellphones per fridge. Maybe 20 if you figure on being a 2 phone family. The fridge is still a LOT more material.
Still, doesn't mean we can't do more by making chargers more universal, remembering that the batteries are replaceable, and get the cell phone companies to stop locking their phones up so tight that poorer people can get a donated phone, maybe spend $20 on a new battery and add a prepaid plan chip. After all, reuse beats recycling in the chart I was taught - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
I don't read AC A human right
Oddly enough, I did a research paper on this subject my last semester. The problem with e-waste being exported is mainly that there is no real guidelines for exporting electronic waste. Most of the material is considered hazardous because of the metals and BFR's used in manufacturing.
There are companies who say they recycle the products and then just ship the junk over-seas. It's an "Out of sight, out of mind" type of thinking that is impacting other places around the world. Not only that, but most consumers have no idea of what to do with their old electronics. They (clearly an assumption here) probably know the materials need to be recycled but have no idea of how to achieve such a thing. So it ends up sitting in the closet, or storage, or gets thrown into the municipal waste. Of course take back programs are becoming increasingly more common and are now required (I believe).
As for getting the stuff recycled, when someone tries to recycle their old product, they often get charged a recycling fee, such as at Circuit City or Staples. Dumping is 'free' while recycling costs money. Of course none of these things are going to be fixed over night. Just how can this be solved?
I've always said, companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle of any product they produce, including its safe disposal. The way things are now, they are allowed to just dump that cost onto the public, and everyone has to pay the price of mass-consumption, which is mass-disposal.
If your company's monitor costs $30 to dispose of properly, that cost should be your company's responsibility. Of course, the company will just pass the cost on to the customer, but that's OK, since it's the customer who's wallet is hit, not the general public. Products that are toxic and cause cancer if they seep into the groundwater SHOULD cost people much, much more, to disincentivise companies from making them in the first place. Maybe higher prices for toxic difficult-to-dispose goods would get people to repair things instead of just tossing them into the bin. At least the extra cost would get them to consider that whatever they are buying is expensive to toss into the Earth.
As it is now, people just buy the cheapest product they can find without regard for the damage it does to the environment, because that damage is done to "those other people somewhere". Make that damage hit their wallet, and you'll see change.
Most of those cultures prefer to be left-alone. They don't want us interfering with how they live, anymore than we would want a bunch of Bible-thumpers forcing us to go to Church every Sunday. Although I disagree with Afghanistan culture (and Arab culture in general), I don't think I should be telling other people how to live. I am not a Bible-thumper.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Let's just pick an appropriate spot in the worlds oceans, and build one of these with the E-Waste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_reef
Divers would love to see baby Moray eels popping out of the slot in old VCRs.
I wouldn't worry about the hazardous material being toxic. Many of the oceans' species are millions of years old, they know how to deal with toxic waste.
Probably.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I used to do that too, but now eBay in their infinite greed, is forcing everybody to take PayPal.. Which means the fact that you put "AS-IS" in your auction description, and the fact that there are NO returns, is ignored by PayPal, who cheerfully refunds the buyers money, and usually you are out your item AND your $$$. When I sold "as-is" electronics, I described the item extensively, took lots of pix, and took checks/mo's only... Worked fine, from 1998 to now... Now with the inmates running the asylum at eBay, I'm steering clear of it until/if the eBay Board of Directors finally say "enough" and can JD..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
More to the point, you are responsible for throwing the stuff away in the first place. So pretending they brought the problems on themselves is pathetic evasion. You're just defending your right to pollute. Somebody still has to clean up after you.
Broken window fallacy much ?
Don't forget that the FCC-Mandated digital TV switch will likely result in tens of millions of perfectly good televisions going into the trash heap this year. Legally enforced obsolescence has some side effects.
1) Do you really think that the people of this village wake up in the morning and think "By gum, I can't wait for another day of handling toxic materials with no protection whatsoever. My only hope is that those meddling foreigners, and their insipid health and safety standards, don't rob me of this, my most beloved pastime!"
Someone else posted this video, but I'll link to it again as it shows the village. These people aren't working in some factory, they are in huts with dirt floors.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4586903n
2) If we really wanted to leave these people alone, perhaps we shouldn't be sending them tonnes upon tonnes of toxic materials?
To answer "And I care why?" - Well because all of us consumers of electronic devices are partially responsible for the suffering of these people. Because this computer you are sitting at right now may very well end up in a village in China where it will poison people.
Old electrolytic capacitors leak toxic chemicals. A capacitor popping and drying out is a leading cause of electronics failure. If that stuff gets on you or you inhale the vapors it's bad. How can you make the process safer? Use robots to pick at the stuff? They are too expensive for now, and not smart enough, without enough dexterity.
Maybe use huge smelter to melt down and combust all the epoxy boards, plastic casings and everything, including dioxins to carbon dioxide and slag. The slag will contain mostly oxides of calcium (from plastic fillers), aluminum, silicon, iron, tin, lead, copper, and minute amounts of gold and silver, and some other metals such as tantalum, indium, germanium and gallium and arsenic oxides.
Processing this slag to extract things like tantalum and indium is the same problem as oxygen extraction from lunar anorthite - we basically don't have a good technology to process calcium alumino silicate. And at least the lunar anorthite is a dust, somewhat reactive powder for acid processing, but the slag from this smelter is just going to be a hard chunk of rock. Moreover oxides of lead, arsenic and chlorides of copper and iron chlorides (especially if burnt with PVC plastic parts) will tend to distill out in the process, and would have to be collected from the vapor. If you can separate the plastic casings, that can cut down on the calcium at least but the electrolytic capacitors are loaded with aluminum, and aluminum oxide is hard to process. Not oxidizing the mixture, and just melting it down anaerobically is not workable, because the epoxy boards would turn into charcoal that absorbs everything else on the surface.
Newer circuits are smaller, more of the components such as capacitors in a circuit are purely silicon on chip, so waste in 2020 will not be as dangerous as the waste from say 1980 to 2010, so investing a lot into a recycling facility that has no future, well. In case a workable semi-economic lunar oxygen extraction is found, that could indiscriminately process and safetify waste of any kind, including medical and biological waste together with electronic waste, that would be a worthy investment. In the meantime slag in a landfill with a plastic sheathing on bottom that doesn't get punctured and leak dissolved lead, arsenic, indium and such into the groundwater table is the answer, and slag is much safer than unsmelted electronics in the same landfill, because at least the toxic organic contaminants such as chlorinated solvents are dealt with, and the slag may leach toxic metals, but do so at an extremely slow rate.
Or just give it to China? Let somebody else deal with the problem, and then there is no problem? The problem starts when we don't live like the Amish, completely organic with all waste naturally recyclable, with no technology, other than say steel, that's still naturally recyclable. Once we hydrogenate vegetable oil, once we make materials such as polyethylene that nature has never seen, nor can digest, once use a cellphone that has indium displays, or gallium arsenide chips, after that the problem is here. We still choose to do it because we derive economic benefit from it, but the real problem comes later. At least steel used by the Amish for nails, horseshoes and plows, is naturally recyclable - it rusts away. There has to be a way to have electronics from the start that will be recyclable later, that's where the problem needs to be attacked. Such as fully miniaturized electronics with everything on-chip, silicon the only raw material, and some board that's easier than epoxy to separate during recycling, such as simple pure polypropylene that can be melted down, then combusted without combusting the silicon, and silicon recycled from the metal through tetrachloride distillation. That's soon doable, unless the "economy" does not allow it.
Ethics is a luxury, and should be done as a showoff of luxury, as opposed to generating massive amounts of waste as a showoff of luxury.
Every goddamn device that comes out absolutely must have a connector or power cord that is incompatible with every other device. For example, the Thinkpad T43 and T60 have incompatible power cords (not to pick on Lenovo; it's just typical). This lack of standards leads to the junking of millions of electronic items every year.
When your cell phone battery burns out, it costs almost as much as a new phone to replace it. Often, a battery for a phone more than a year old is simply unobtainable, and a perfectly usable phone goes in the trash. There is a dizzying array of battery and power cord types. They come in an endless array of forms and types, all of which are mutually incompatible. Power cords often contain transformers that are packed with nasty chemicals. That we throw so many of them away unnecessarily every year is criminal.
The FCC needs to get with standard boards such as ANSI and IEEE to create standards for connectors and power cords for small electronic devices.
Were all electronic appliances to work like this, you would have to have an electrician come install a different plug for every device (TV, fridge, microwave, dishwasher, blender, griddle, desk lamp, alarm clock, radio, etc) that you own.
The current system in large part owes to corporate greed. Companies are motivated by the ability to charge exorbitant prices for their one-of-a-kind accessories. The Obama administration should step in and implement a "green" measure that would quickly make us all better off.
I'd mod you up if I had the points.
This is the same mentality that people use to justify tossing garbage onto the street when there's a trash can one block further, or leaving your tray at the fast food table even though you'll pass the trash on your way out.
That said, it seems the e-waste getting to China is coming from people who were conscientious enough to not throw it in the garbage. May have even paid out-of-pocket for the recycler to take it.
Sad that an accreditation program has to be implemented, and even more government overhead to manage it. One more mark against the "the free market will take care of it" mantra; no it won't, it only gets it out-of-sight and out-of-mind, ending with the poorest of the poor.
Virtually no one is using the millions of 386 and 486s out there. At some point, the items sold on eBay will end up being effectively worthless, and the question is, what then?
Why is it, that during the election....people were saying "Oh...you shouldn't vote for/against him due to his color", or if you did you were racist one way or the other.
Now that he's elected....why are new now singing praises to the US people that we elected a black man?
C'mon people, if you want a color blind society...at least try to stay consistent.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The leaded part is the front. Manufacturers put metal shields made of iron either inside or outside to stop the soft xrays. To prevent hard xrays they instituted drastic safety features that monitor voltage, current, high voltage, and high voltage current. If a problem were to be detected the device would shut down. The manufacturers who did the monitoring most successfully could then make their CRT's less expensive. Once the patents ran out every manufacturer used this technology. Sony had an internal shield which I believe they patented, at some point all manufactures used internal soft xray shields.
Eventually the manufacturers got the weight down substantially. I do not have figures on that but suspect the article is tainted by gross bias.
It's moot since CRT's of any kind are DEAD. Long Live OLED!!! ... Please?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Some people just aren't that intelligent and/or informed. We dump shitloads of CO2 into the environment but a lot of people still don't make the connection with global warming. People that do recognize the effects of global warming still tend to drive cars, use electricity, and heat their homes despite the negative impact on the environment.
It's not really a choice then is it? It's a matter or survival.
Time makes more converts than reason
It's only fair considering most of this trash was made in China to begin with.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil