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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.
Where they found a battery with enough juice to power a GPS (Radio) device for the months required to cross the ocean, through the hull of a ship, and then have the GPS unit pass undetected through customs etc?
I think it's more likely someone found the GPS unit, and sold it on Ebay, raising a false positive when it was powered up. Or, the entire article could be a sham to begin with.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Seriously, the ONLY way to solve this, is for us to stop allowing ANY garbage to be exported. Then capitalism will find solutions rather quickly. Most importantly, it will help bring back manufacturing since we will then have resources that need to be used, and can not be exported.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I always debated this with people that think that everything must be digital because "dead-tree stuff is bad and will kill our planet (tm)". Come on! First trees are renewable and I prefer having papers and books in a landfield than laptop, cell, TV, batteries, ... Don't get me wrong. I work in IT for 21 years and I love it, but the problem is that people change their e-stuffs almost every year because their e-stuffs became obsolete, slow like hell because the latest OS updates (I'm talking to you Apple and Microsoft), ...
PS: Sorry for my English quality.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
It is true that computer garbage is worthless crap, except when you re-use parts (or whole items). In some countries, people repair even dumb phones.
Basel is a mouthpiece for the recycling industries, they're paid to make high profile stories once in a while. The industries want for all US garbage to be destroyed in the US. This would expand their business, that's all. They want to make it illegal that your dead laptop's LCD panel ends up in some African kid's laptop.
And that, unfortunately, is the inconvenient truth about recycling. It's seems like a good idea, and we've been taught for our entire lives not to be wasteful, and we don't want to hurt the environment, so obviously recycling must be a really good thing. Right? Well, the problem is the old saying 'the devil is in the details'. When you look closely, very closely, at recycling, it's not such a great idea.
The recycling process itself produces a lot of pollutants. In Washington state, the top air polluters are all recycling centers. And at least one of them has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for repeatedly violating air pollution standards.
Paper recycling generates a sludge that is sent to a landfill where it can leach dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals into groundwater. If you think that there would be regulations against that, you’d be right. But there’s one loophole: mixing anything else with the paper sludge, even just sand, turns it from waste into a product. And there are no regulations against tossing tens of thousands of tons of your product into a landfill.
Most plastics can't be recycled. There are about seven types of plastic that you’ll find in day to day life, and only two of them are recyclable. Anything else placed in a recycling bin will be collected, processed, and sorted, and then thrown straight into a landfill. Even trying to recycle some things—for example the plastic that electronics are packaged in—wastes all those resources.
But it gets worse: Plastic is automatically sorted at recycling plants, but the process is far from perfect. As a result some plastics can slip through even when they’re not supposed to, and you might end up with chemicals like BPA in plastics that aren’t supposed to have it.
Most small scale motor oil recycling centers use something known as the acid-clay process. This gets impurities out of the oil, but leaves you with a toxic sludge containing all of those impurities, plus dangerous chemicals like hydrochloric acid. So what do they do with that toxic waste? They burn it, sending chemicals like nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide into the air. And that’s pretty much the official, EPA approved method.
Glass is made from sand, the most abundant resource on the planet. The process for recycling glass is more detrimental than the process for creating virgin glass.
But the biggest flaw in recycling doesn’t have anything to do with the technical process—it’s the mindset it gives people. The idea is that by putting materials in the recycle bin, by buying products made from recycled material, we’re saving the environment—we’re all a team of individual Captain Planets, kicking pollution to the curb. But how effective is that when the US alone still produces 250 million tons of trash every year?
Recycling’s main impact is to convince us that it’s okay to be wasteful because we make up for it through recycling. It encourages consumption, rather than focusing on ways to reduce overall consumption and generate less trash to begin with.