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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.
We apologise for the faults in the summary. Those responsible have been sacked.
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.
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.
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?
The editors were replaced with dancing llamas a looong time ago (and not at great expense, either).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
Because there is little oversight or enforcement, a secondary industry of fake editors has popped up to undercut sustainable editing. These "editors," which advertise themselves as green and sustainable, get paid pennies per post about old TVs, computers, printers, and monitors. Rather than edit them domestically, the editing companies sell them to editors in developing nations, either through middlemen or directly. These foreign editors hire low-wage employees to pick through the few valuable components of often toxic old stories.
It's all about who pays for what how. The fact that it is far easier to chuck the broken kit and buy new than get the upgrade / repair is a result of the incredible efficiency of mass production. If you want to avoid waste, you have to make the waste worth something - a standard trick in the Chemical industry, but one not associated with electronics because of the speed of change - or make visibly recycling electronics a mandatory requirement, to be paid for by a visible tax on electronic items. Which is the problem; the price of virtue is too high...
At least my carbon credits are on the up and up.
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.
Disclaimer: we build GPS trackers.
You don't need a very big battery. You just power down for most of the time. Wake up once in a while (daily or even less). Try to get a connection. No connection? Probably at sea, so power down. Keep trying until you get a connection and update your location. You don't need to know the exact route - just the starting point and the end point (maybe a few extra once you are on land again). It really doesn't need a huge battery at all; the one they show in the picture even seem rather large for this.
To give you an idea, we can send thousands of GPS locations over a cellular network with a tiny 1000mAh battery. We have some heavy duty batteries that can go up to 10 times that capacity to actively track assets for months on end at very frequent intervals. Putting a 10Ah battery like that and using infrequent updates can last for a year easily.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
Where they found a battery with enough juice to power a GPS (Radio) device for the months required to cross the ocean
Well, that took 5 seconds. The third result of a Google search for "long life GPS cellular tracking (http://digitalmatter.com/Devices/Remora) is a non-descript device which features a 5 year battery life with once-per-day tracking, which seems more than adequate for this. If you don't like that one, the results of that search are filled with others.
through the hull of a ship
The location while in transit across the ocean isn't relevant to this study, so the device doesn't have to transmit through the hull of the ship. It just has to be able to continue transmitting once it's been offloaded at the destination so that the destination can be identified.
then have the GPS unit pass undetected through customs
We're talking about containers stuffed with used and broken electronics being delivered to countries that accept them as garbage to be recycled, so that raises three questions:
1) What the hell makes you think the destination countries have customs agents thoroughly inspecting tons upon tons of incoming garbage?
2) How would these hypothetical garbage-inspecting customs agents identify one particular electronic device buried in a pile of other electronic devices as something unusual?
3) Finally, assuming that there is some government that's willing to accept electronics waste (and all its hazardous components) for recycling, yet somehow still anal-retentive enough to inspect said electronics and wealthy enough to be able to pay for the metric ass load of customs agents it would take to inspect and identify everything in the shipment and determine that the GPS tracking was not broken and was active and somehow magically determine that it's being listened to, why would they care? Tracking shipments is a normal thing for that shipping companies do on a regular basis.
Notice the "recyclers" are FREE MARKET BUSINESSES?
Because we cannot have the state do the correct thing now, can we?
So, more Capitalism, more scams, more frauds
THE FREE MARKET AT WORK FOR YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN
Oh, wait....
And the transition was so seamless that barely anyone noticed it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, you actual knowledge is false because random internet conspiracy guy says so. He had a whole 3 reasons he came up with in his head without any actual knowledge, so he must be right.
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.
His covert devices suck. We do twice a day updates on a 2000mAh battery for months at a time...
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
. . . . just isn't there for most ***CONSUMER*** materials. other than Aluminum cans. Or to quote Penn and Teller:
Recycling is. . . bullshit
Now, for metals, on an industrial level, recycling can make sense, steel also makes particular sense, in sufficient quantity.
For consumer recycling, things are hard to recycle ON PURPOSE. Just like they're impossible to repair: giving the consumer no option than to go out and buy a new one.
I'm showing my age, but I can still remember when there were vacuum tube testers in most hardware stores: you'd pull a tube you suspected was bad, test it, and if it WAS bad, you'd buy a replacement from the rack built underneath the tube tester.
The entire consumer industrial base is designed around obsolescence and replacement, rather than repair and/or upgrade. . .
Would love some references to these assertions.