SCN: Recycling

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

=================


(John Markoff, NY Times)---The global export of electronics waste, 
including consumer devices, computer monitors and circuit boards, 
is creating environmental and health problems in the third world, a 
report to be issued on Monday by five environmental organizations 
says.  

The report says that 50 to 80 percent of electronics waste 
collected for recycling in the United States is placed on container 
ships and sent to China, India, Pakistan or other developing 
countries, where it is reused or recycled under largely unregulated 
conditions, often with toxic results.  

The groups said there were no precise estimates of the amount of 
such waste currently created by the disposal of obsolete consumer 
electronic and computing gear. The Environmental Protection 
Agency estimated last year, however, that in 1997 as many as 3.2 
million tons of "e- waste" ended up in United States landfills and 
that the amount might increase fourfold in several years.  

The groups also cited National Safety Council estimates that as 
many as 315 million computers have or will become obsolete from 
1997 to 2004, generating a wide range of potentially toxic wastes.  

For example, each color computer monitor or television display 
contains an average of four to eight pounds of lead, which can 
enter the environment when the monitors are illegally disposed of 
in landfills.  

"We've created a problem that has to be dealt with," said Ted 
Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, one 
of the groups that participated in the report. The others are the 
Basel Action Network, Toxics Link India, Pakistan's Society for the 
Conservation and Protection of the Environment and Greenpeace 
China.  

An E.P.A. scientist, Robert Tonetti, acknowledged that a significant 
portion of the nation's obsolete consumer electronics gear was 
exported. He said, however, that there was no systematic reporting 
of the shipments, so there was no way to gauge the extent of the 
problem accurately. "No one has a good grasp of the numbers," 
said Mr. Tonetti, a senior environmental scientist in the E.P.A.'s 
office of solid waste.  

Mr. Tonetti said that figures in a 1999 National Safety Council 
report showed that about 723,000 computer monitors had been 
recycled in the United States and 100,000 had been exported. The 
report noted that more than a million monitors were unaccounted 
for and that many of them may have gone to parts brokers who 
subsequently exported the gear.  

There is an international debate over how to deal with the problem, 
Mr. Tonetti said, adding that the European Union was moving 
toward requiring manufacturers to take cradle-to-grave 
responsibility for their products, particularly when they contain 
potentially hazardous materials. In contrast, the United States 
industry has resisted this approach, he said.  

While there is no consensus on a solution, he said the 
environmental groups had focused on important issues that should 
have more attention. Mr. Tonetti added, however, that the cradle-
to-grave approach was not endorsed by the United States 
government. Environmental groups, he said, have overlooked that 
much electronics manufacturing is now outside of the United 
States and Europe, complicating the issue of manufacturer 
responsibility.  

He also said that a significant factor in the increased export of 
obsolete electronics from the United States was the closing of 
smelters here in recent years, frequently because of environmental 
regulations.  

The report, "Exporting Harm: The Techno-Trashing of Asia," 
focuses on electronics recycling around the region of Guiyu in 
Guangdong province in China. The area, which is northeast of 
Hong Kong, includes a cluster of small villages that since 1995 
have become a booming recycling center for electronic gear 
arriving from all over the globe through the port of Nanhai.  

The region has a work force of approximately 100,000 people 
focused on recycling, the report stated, with the process broken 
into small, specialized cottage work groups. In one neighborhood, 
plastics may be salvaged, while in another, circuit boards may be 
smelted to extract trace amounts of gold and other valuable 
materials, according to the investigators, who visited the region in 
December last year.  

One casualty of the recycling boom in the region has been drinking 
water, the report says. Since 1995, as a result of groundwater 
pollution, water has been trucked in from 20 miles away.  

The investigators said the recycling operations often involved 
young children, many of whom were unaware of the hazards. The 
hazardous operations included open burning of plastics and wires, 
riverbank acid works to extract gold, the melting and burning of 
soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of cathode 
ray tubes laden with lead.  

The report described certain areas of Guiyu that were dedicated to 
dismantling printers. In those areas, toner cartridges were recycled 
manually, according to Jim Puckett, an author of the report.  

"Workers without any protective respiratory equipment or special 
clothing of any kind opened cartridges with screwdrivers and then 
used paint brushes and their hands to wipe the toner into a 
bucket," the report said. It added that the process created constant 
clouds of toner, which were routinely inhaled.  

Mr. Puckett, coordinator of the Basel Action Network, said, "They 
call this recycling, but it's really dumping by another name." The 
network is an international watchdog group that is trying to enforce 
the Basel Convention, a 1989 United Nations treaty intended to 
limit the export of hazardous waste. The United States is the only 
developed nation that has not signed it.  

The convention calls on countries to reduce exports of hazardous 
wastes to a minimum and deal with their waste problems within 
their own borders where possible.  

The authors of the report argue that stricter environmental 
regulations in the developed world have caused a trend toward 
exporting hazardous materials to the poorest countries, where 
occupational and environmental protections are inadequate.  

The environmental groups took water and soil samples along the 
Lianjiang River and had them tested by a private center in Hong 
Kong. The results, the groups said, revealed alarming levels of 
heavy metals that corresponded directly with metals most 
commonly found in computers. The water sample, taken near a 
site where circuit boards were processed and burned, showed 
levels of toxic materials 190 times the levels for drinking water 
recommended by the World Health Organization.  

The report also notes evidence of similar unregulated recycling 
operations in both Pakistan and India. The researchers said that 
Karachi, Pakistan, was one of the country's principal markets for 
second-hand and scrap materials.  


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company





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