Slashdot Mirror
Environmental Watchdogs Confused By E-Waste Practices
retroworks writes with a California-centric story that might have parallels in other states, too: "The Sacramento Bee digs further into the controversy over E-Waste exports, and finds that environmental watchdogs doth protest too much. Remember how we were all urged to use a 'Pledge' Signing company to properly recycle our old computers and televisions? Remember how companies which didn't 'Pledge' were accused of exporting toxic poisons by groups like Basel Action Network? The Bee's Tom Knudson discovered that some of the loudest Pledge recycling companies used the exact same exporting brokers as BAN was attacking as 'worst actors.' One California firm exported 6.9 million pounds of raw electronics through the same export market which the environmental 'watchdog' attacked earlier this year... Whether or not the export market was ok to begin with, or continues to be unacceptable, the watchdogs still want to be the experts of who is the best 'e-waste' recycling company. Credibility, RIP."
What's the issue here? China makes cheap crap, we use it and send it back. Let the toxins go back to where they were created.
Short insight from a former insider - the problem is huge, the middle men working to facilitate the process are abundant, the business model is quick, simple, and lucrative. Unfortunately it robs us of our responsibility to the planet as well as an entire necessary industry we should be advancing, that is the safe deconstruction and recycling of modern devices. It's a messy situation. But nothing modern engineering couldn't design around, and I think in the long run we could craft very clean, efficient methods of dealing with a lot of this "waste". Yes, we have some growth in this area, but the problem is that it's still too expensive. Stateside recyclers charge somewhere between $10-80 dollars per cathode ray tube handled, whereas most waste brokers who ship overseas will pay you, something like $20-50 a pallet (of I think 36). The most unfortunate part is that customers here really do have an interest in doing things correctly, they just don't often have a budget for it and shop on promises but also price.
I'm thoroughly humbled by the fact that I have no friggin idea what the summary is saying. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?
weinersmith
One of the best places is ACCRC. Usable stuff is refurbished for charity organizations, schools, etc. and the rest is handled responsibly and locally by ECS Refining in Santa Clara. Small fees are charged since this isn't as cheap/profitable as sending it overseas. But in the past they've taken stuff for free on Earth Day (April 22) so I save my small circuit boards and cables till then. The bottom line: do your own research. Especially if a recycler is eager to take anything and everything for free.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Actually it's illegal to dispose of waste in that fashion according to Chinese law. The problem though is that it's not particularly well enforced due to rampant corruption at the local level.
That seems to be the problem with all Chinese law.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
E-Waste that gets shipped to China and other places, sometimes ends up handled by facilities without adequate worker protection and polluting the environment. The journo doesn't provide any real information of what percentage of waste ends up handled in this way and how much is handled in a responsible manner. Nor does he make any mention of how Chinese law regards these activities. China is mentioned only as a bogeyman.
Oh, look! Someone right here in the good old USA has found a solution! Yay! The Chinese bogeyman can be defeated! But, wait... there are some fly-by-night operators who don't want to embrace this triumph of American ingenuity. Obviously, those fly-by-night folks are just looking for a quick buck while the larger businesses are really looking out for the environment.
Therefore, we should pass some kind of law to prevent export of e-waste. The large businesses that can afford to vertically integrate (through capital expenditures on the machinery for e-waste processing [NB: Investment in jobs vs machinery is related to cost of labor {Where labor is cheap (China, global south), work is done by workers. Where workers are expensive (USA, EU, etc.), work is done by machines}]) obviously have environmental interests at heart (never commercial interests.)
So, the article offers a problem (hellish conditions in some places receiving electronics exports from the USA), and offers a solution (requiring the processing of waste in the USA). Who will benefit from this? The large, vertically integrated e-waste companies in the USA. Who will lose? 1) All of the small e-waste collectors who will now be forced to sell their raw e-waste to the large domestic operators, and 2) all of the foreign e-waste processing centers.
The end result would be that all e-waste would be processed through a small number very rich e-waste processors. The barrier to entry (through investment in machinery and whatever certification process they create) will be so high and the economies of scale so large that perhaps 3 big companies will be processing all US e-waste if it's export were banned.
How much do you want to bet that some actors in the e-waste marketplace who aspire to be larger processors put something in the ear of the journalist?
If you actually care about the environment, it's probably more productive to just bribe the correct Chinese officials to enforce their laws than to enact export bans or mandatory certification processes in the USA.
Unlike the "normal" e-waste companies who take hardware and ship it Chindifrica to places where kids melt components off PCBs over an open fire, ACCRC actually does it right.
My God, has it really been 5 Thanksgivings since I wrote my Alice's Restaurant parody in response to a comment on a Slashdot post on "Whose Burden is it to Recycle Computers?" when the CA law came out.
The punchline to the joke is that less than two years after I wrote it, life imitated art. Officer Obie really did have a problem when someone took a big pile of garbage and turned it into something that a school could use, and it was only through the dumb luck of blind justice that the Judge didn't see it that way.
I've never had to pay a dime to ACCRC, but whenever I make a dropoff, I've always tossed a few bucks in as a donation, because I know that anything useful will get used - if not at a school, at least in an art project, and the rest will be disposed of of safely and responsibly.
So we'll sing it again when it comes around on the guitar.
"Reuse any hardware you want from Natalie's Restaurant, .JPGs of Natalie)
(excepting drives with
Reuse any hardware you want from Natalie's Restaurant,
Monitors, just around the back,
Just a half a mile from the railroad track,
And you can get any grits you want at Natalie's Restaurant."
Do de do, dee de doo de doo...
The problem here is the same faced by any industry. Programs like eStewardship are voluntary programs and not subject to legal enforcement so the field is potentially ripe with opportunity to defraud your customers with higher processing fees for all the added expense of being green. It's largely a marketing tool on both ends and I'm sure there are plenty of people in the industry who see it as nothing but.
However, there are plenty of people who do take this very seriously, and it's unfortunate that our credibility is being tarnished. Sadly there's little that can be done about it, auditing processes will catch companies that merely don't meet the standards, but there's nothing that can be done about those who intentionally falsify records or aim for loopholes.
I can only recommend that those looking to be rid of their hardware do their due diligence, there's no reason a company shouldn't able be to provide a list of their downstream processors by name or offer you a tour of their facilities.
How about none of our e-waste leaves the country so we can reclaim as many of the rare earth elements as we can before handing things back to Asia.
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I have mod points, but for some reason it won't let me mod the summary as troll.
There have been some bias in articles before, but this one goes off the hook. A scumbag company lies to everyone and scams them, but it's all the environmentalists fault for falling for the same scam everyone else did?
This sentence no verb.