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Where Does America's E-Waste End Up? GPS Tracker Tells All (pbs.org)
The United States produces more e-waste than any country in the world, reports PBS News Hour. But where does this e-waste go? The publication utilized the GPS coordinates in some of the e-waste to find out. Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based e-waste watchdog group partnered with MIT to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs -- enterprises that advertise themselves as "green," "sustainable," "earth friendly" and "environmentally responsible." From the report: About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas -- some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that e-waste watchdog group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon. The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong. You can read the report in its entirety here.
"Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong"
RURAL Hong Kong, haha -- Even the New Territories can't be considered 'rural' by the most urbanite standards.
Bye!
Okay, it goes places, and ... what?
It has to go somewhere. The question is what happens then?
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e-waste originated in many of these places so it's on fair that it should come home to to die (a thousand deaths)
Amazingly all the rest were tracked to my basement.
what should happen is E-Waste companies should have to Document and Prove exactly where the stuff goes (and what happens to it). Fines should be based on amount processed in the past say 2 years (say 50K per ton).
Ok, so the geotags show the equipment ending up all over the world. So? The real question was were they recycled?? Re-used?? Or were these confirmed landfills?
No, I didn't read the article.
A farmer grew the food I ate, so it's only fair that I go shit in his house.
Everybody looks the other way. When I drop off an old flip-phone in the recycle bin at Target, I hope that it will be recycled in a clean manner, but somehow or other, I know that I'm fooling myself.
The end result is that many of these electronics are getting recycled, just overseas. One can make a sound argument for the health of the workers due to toxins, but lets face the fact the working conditions in some nations are lackluster. Remember employees making iphones killing themselves, and the sweat shops in India and Vietnam for clothing and shoes?
I am not arguing that these people do not deserve better conditions, but think it is important to note that recycling is occurring, and some people are getting to work to feed themselves and their families.
I would have expected the majority would have gone almost anywhere other than Hong Kong.
I saw a documentary a while back showing how much perfectly good/working electronics and appliances of their own that the Hong Kong Chinese are ploughing back into landfills since the people there are apparently used to throwing out even expensive stuff just because its over a year or two old.
Why on earth would they want our old shit?
how about the manufacturing e-waste?
I don't care a Linux desktop where it goes so long as it doesn't go here!
TFA mentions 1/3 wind up overseas.
WTF happened to the other 66% of electronics?!?! As far as I could tell the TFA forgets that it had another 132 other data points to share, instead focusing on 7% of the goods that support the addenda they are pushing.
garbage story.
>> a Seattle-based e-waste watchdog group ...dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs -- enterprises that advertise themselves as "green," "sustainable," "earth friendly" and "environmentally responsible." ...About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas
A lot of businesses quickly figured out that people who go "awww" when they see whales or polar bears are often more easily parted from their money than the general public, and since calling themselves "green" takes no actual extra work - you might even get the ganza-smelling dude hauling monitors to work cheaper if he thinks he's working for "a cause" - what did you really expect?
Yes, the problem isn't that the waste goes somewhere. The problem is where it goes. That said, the two are strongly connected.
"Recyclers" are probably not shipping this waste somewhere with strict environmental controls; environmental controls cost money to comply with, so it doesn't make much sense to ship to places with meaningful environmental controls. They're not shipping this stuff to Japan, Europe, etc. In principle, they could be shipping it somewhere with strict environmental controls (that are actually enforced) but low enough labor costs to make up for the cost of shipping, but if such a place exists, that's news to me. Indeed, the article documents that fact that a lot of these electronics are being shipped to countries where environmental controls are non-existent or not enforced. In short, the fact that they're shipping this stuff out of the country should raise red flags.
No, No, and not really. The valuable parts were stripped and the rest dumped. For example, the dumped parts included cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) from LCD screens. CCFLs contain mercury and should be handled carefully instead of being thrown on the ground (like they were in the article).
“People have the right to know where their stuff goes,”
No, they don't. When you donate, you are giving up ownership of the item. Your rights with regard to the object end there.
However, the general populace should have the right to know that companies claiming to recycle/re-use e-waste are living up to their claims.
Seriously, we absolutely SHOULD be doing our own recycling. A lot of this can actually be burned, just in special incinerators. As to the elements that come out, we can either separate them and sell them off, OR, we could put them down inside of a deep mine, and save them for future uses, which we WILL need.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Many years ago. GPS tracked supposed recycled electronics ends on on the other side of the earth, sometimes actually recycled in heavily polluted dumpsites, some resold as working even though their broken. After I saw that, I physically destroy any type of hard drive and put the remains in the trash.
The vast majority of the stuff that's getting sent to foreign countries isn't getting reused -- and for good reasons.
First, if something is reasonably valuable, it's probably being reused in the states (e.g. the Dell/Goodwill program mentioned in TFA).
Moreover, old computers and CRTs aren't that useful in the third world. A cheap, new smart phone is much more useful since it has wireless connectivity and a battery (the phone is probably more powerful than a CRT-era desktop to boot). In many developing countries, you're a lot more likely to have a wireless signal than a wired internet connection. Your desktop also won't do much good if the power grid is in poor condition -- or non-existent (you can charge your smart phone from a solar panel). There's a reason that cheap smartphones are popular in developing countries.
Do you eat seafood? Then you should care...
So all that effort that businesses put into properly separating recyclables from other solid waste
Some background:
http://abc7ny.com/home/who-really-takes-out-the-garbage-where-does-it-go/1275453/
And an interesting article on the commercial carting industry in NYC:
http://citylimits.org/2015/05/19/city-weighs-reining-in-private-garbage-collectors/
PBS authors are xenophobes. Next.
Let's be real. This stuff is not being "recycled". Oh, there might be some places pulling some precious metals out of the mix, but most of it is just plastic and metals that no one has any interest in recycling. There would be a lot less waste if devices were more modular, and standards were not constantly changing, but I don't know how you get companies to build stuff like that.
Proverbs 21:19
It's not a 3rd world country with no environmental and worker protection laws.
WTF?
One worker says he isn’t aware of the risks. “He had no idea,” Su says, after speaking with him in Mandarin.
Well yeah, he had no idea what she asked him. Low skilled workers in Hong Kong are likely to speak Cantonese.
Is there such a thing? Having been there once, I don't remember having seen much in the way of undeveloped countryside in Hong-Kong itself.
...they found where old GPS tracking devices are sent!
The cost to the environment of disposing of this waste is higher than id it had been landfilled locally. The extra cost should be taxed to the politically correct who support these fake solutions.
The article is slim about details of the tracker, the battery life, the battery capacity required to manage such life etc., Any ideas?
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Not a surprise.
The same was found for UK WEEE waste. Someone in China or India will happily sign anything you like if they can become your "recycling partner", and then just throw the stuff into their local (unregulated) landfill.
I do a lot of WEEE disposal (if you throw out over a ton of waste electrical equipment a year, you're required to track it with paperwork, below that, not!). The guys who email me about offering that service all claim to be WEEE registered. One of them, many years ago when the scheme was only a year or two old, took my old CRT's and told me exactly what happens to them: They drive them to Heathrow in a big lorry, where someone pays 1GBP each for them, which pays the petrol for the journey. Those people load them on a plane, signs the official "we will dispose of them properly" paperwork (so the first company are covered and so am I), and then nobody's quite sure what happens there on...
But I can't see that a lorry full of old CRT's are worth even 1GBP each in metals and materials, certainly not 1GBP + staff wages + disposal of the dangerous stuff + international transport via cargo plane + sitting and recycling the potentially useful stuff.
Unofficially, the guy was told it just goes into landfill abroad - but because the paperwork DOESN'T say that, everyone is covered. And if the company in India that signed that declaration is found to be dumping the waste? Well, there are lots of others and you can "start" another company quite quickly.
And previous tracking projects like this (I've seen at least three or four from local news to nationwide research) confirm to me that, pretty much, that's what happens whether it's supposed to or not. I imagine the easy-pickings (the still-working old Dell computers, etc.) are sold on locally, the large blocks of metal (e.g. rack units and anything that can be removed as a lump of metal etc.) are melted down by the local scrapyard, and anything hazardous is shipped out because it's such a cost to deal with and someone in a third-world country will happily take it off a plane, take the time to weed out the gold etc. without care for their staff, dump the rest for you, and then sign anything you want so long as it's accompanied by a few quid.
And because it's gone out of the EU and has "legal" documents, the originating countries don't really care.
"Su talks to the workers and finds out many are migrants from mainland China, who are residing in Hong Kong without the official documents required for them to legally be there, she says."
It would be interesting to see where Japans e-waste goes, or the other countries of electronics origin.
so 2/3rds of the stuff stayed domestic, while only a third tracked went overseas? Sounds like one could, if they were inclined to make a positive statement, claim truthfully that the "vast majority of e-waste is handled domestically"...
but there is no "point" of an "action" committee that doesn't find "bad news" to "watchdog".