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A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Forty percent of all U.S. electronics recyclers testers included in [a study that used GPS trackers to follow e-waste over the course of two years] proved to be complete shams, with our e-waste getting shipped wholesale to landfills in Hong Kong, China, and developing nations in Africa and Asia. The most important thing to know about the e-waste recycling industry is that it is not free to recycle an old computer or an old CRT television. The value of the raw materials in the vast majority of old electronics is worth less than it costs to actually recycle them. While consumers rarely have to pay e-waste recycling companies to take their old electronics (costs are offset by local tax money or manufacturers fronting the bill as part of a legally mandated obligated recycling quota), companies, governments, and organizations do. Based on the results of a new study from industry watchdog Basel Action Network and MIT, industry documents obtained by Motherboard, and interviews with industry insiders, it's clear that the e-waste recycling industry is filled with sham operations profiting off of shipping toxic waste to developing nations. Here are the major findings of the study and of my interviews and reporting: Real, environmentally sustainable electronics recycling can be profitable only if recycling companies charge a fee to take on old machines; the sale of recycled materials rarely if ever covers the actual cost of recycling in the United States. Companies, governments, and other organizations have a requirement to recycle old machines; because there is little oversight or enforcement, a secondary industry of fake recyclers has popped up to undercut sustainable recyclers. These "recyclers," which advertise themselves as green and sustainable, get paid pennies per pound to take in old TVs, computers, printers, and monitors. Rather than recycle them domestically, the recycling companies sell them to junkyards in developing nations, either through middlemen or directly. These foreign junkyards hire low-wage employees to pick through the few valuable components of often toxic old machines. The toxic machines are then left in the scrapyards or dumped nearby. Using GPS trackers, industry watchdog Basel Action Network found that 40 percent of electronics recyclers it tested in the United States fall into this "scam recycling" category.
You assume you need to power a GPS 24/7 to be able to track something. A tiny microcontroller can run for months on a battery, powering up the GPS maybe once a day, long enough to read the position before shutting it down again.
There isn't any "customs etc" involved here. All of this shit is loaded onto enormous container ships and gets dumped in places like Guiyu, China. Nobody's inspecting that shit, it's all garbage, it lands at port at Haimen and gets trucked 10 miles inland to massive dumps where it's picked over by little kids who melt everything down looking for precious metals. Nobody is going to detect a GPS unit buried amongst 500 tons of busted up monitors and breadboards.
They could have just copied from the last time this same story was posted back in May... or this one on the same topic from April of last year... or maybe this same story from December of the year before (2013)... or the Australian version from 2010... the UK version from 2014?... Or maybe from this one in 2009... or this other story in 2010?... or this other version in 2008... or a charitable version in 2010.
I knew I'd seen this "story" somewhere before, but at that point, I admit I got bored and stopped looking for more.
If this is still considered news, or newsworthy... well, let's just say it takes the concept of repeated stories on the same topic to a new level...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.