When upgrading your computer means downgrading the environment
The town of Guiyu, located in the Guangdong Province of China was once a poor rice-growing community. Since 1995, the town has been transformed into a booming electronic recycling center. Specialized shelters and yards for recycling operations now take the place of rice fields. Villagers who once earned their income through farming now migrate to Guiyu from surrounding regions for work. In Guiyu, where it's more profitable to smelt circuit boards for gold than mine it from the earth, the villagers can earn $1.50 a day. This source of income, however, comes at the cost of handling toxic waste.
Villages like Guiyu in developing countries are becoming the destination for electronic waste from developed nations. Electronic waste, or "e-waste," which includes electronics such as computers, cell phones, and household appliances, is the fastest growing portion of the waste stream in the United States.
Components of e-waste pose threats to both environmental and human health, making proper disposal crucial. Many facilities across the United States offer e-waste recycling, something that appears to be environmentally sound, but can be misleading. Many e-waste recycling facilities do not process their e-waste properly, or they may ship it oversees. According to the National Safety Council, 80 percent of e-waste collected for recycling in the United States is shipped to developing nations. These nations willingly take the e-waste because of its valuable components such as gold and copper, despite serious impacts that result from improper handling.
"People are willing to pay people to take away their waste," said Jim Puckett, coordinator of Basel Action Network (BAN). "They think it's environmentally sound, and brokers load up containers and ship it to developing nations and get more money at the back end."
The network is a Seattle-based, non-profit organization that seeks to protect the world's poorest nations from toxic dumping.
"They can do this because the government does not control this export in any way shape or form," Puckett said.
The United States is the only developed nation that has not ratified the Basel treaty. Initiated in 1989, the treaty bans the exporting of hazardous waste to undeveloped countries. To date, 168 nations ratified the treaty, said Sarah Westervelt, toxic research analyst for BAN and author of "Exporting Harm," a report on e-waste and exporting.
In 2002, the leaders at BAN set out to find what e-waste exporting looked like. BAN, with the support of Greenpeace China, conducted an investigation of toxic dumping in Guiyu. The network photographed and filmed the region, collected soil, sediment and water samples. They observed that electronic materials such as monitor glass, circuit boards and toner cartridges were dumped in surrounding fields, wetlands, rivers and irrigation banks. The investigation uncovered severe water and soil contamination. The lead in the drinking water was 2,400 times the World Health Organization's acceptable amount.
According to "Exporting Harm," the health effects of lead include damage to the central and peripheral nervous systems, blood systems, kidney and reproductive systems.
Lead mimics calcium and will remain in the body for approximately 35 days, then is stored in the bones. When affected women who have lead stored in their bones go through menopause, their body will pull the calcium out of their bones a nd will extract the lead, which can result in lead poisoning, Westervelt said.
"Too much lead in the body can ultimately lead to death," she said.
Lead also affects cognitive abilities in children. Westervelt said a drop of lead paint the size of a pinhead can cause brain damage in a developing child. The main source of lead in e-waste comes from monitors, which contain 4 to 8 pounds of lead on average.
In Guiyu, the BAN team observed several different specialized operations including printer dismantling, open burning of wires, monitor cracking and dumping, acid stripping of computer chips and breaking apart circuit boards. Residents of a sub village of Guiyu burned wires to recover copper. As a result of the burning, the village is completely covered in black ash residue.
"Wires have Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) coverings and a copper core, when you burn PVC, you create dioxins and furans which come down in the form of ash," Westervelt said. "Dioxin is one of the most toxic substances known."
While most of the e-waste collected by recycling facilities is exported to developing nations, 31 facilities in the United States, four of which are in Washington state, have taken the BAN pledge, promising not to export hazardous e-waste to developing nations, said Yuka Pakamiya, researcher and coordinator of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Responsibility program at BAN.
"The number of facilities that have not taken the BAN Pledge is in the thousands," Puckett said. "They don't do any recycling, it's basically waste distributing."
The RE Store, a non-profit organization in Bellingham that recycles and sells building and home improvement material, provides a local solution for people wanting to responsibly recycle their electronics. ReLectronics, the e-waste recycling program at the RE Store, took the BAN pledge in 2004. The facility was the first nonprofit volunteer-based electronic recycling facility in Washington state. The ReLectronics program follows a "Reuse, Rebuild, Recycle" model where volunteers test the electronics to determine what can be used. Items that can't be reused may be rebuilt or, if necessary, disassembled and recycled. The parts that are to be recycled are then sent to Hallmark Recycling, a Mount Vernon-based company that recycles precious metals, and Total Reclaim, a Seattle-based e-waste recycler.
The ReLectronic's program, which began with a small group of volunteers, is showing considerable growth, said Greg Waters, program manager at ReLectronics.
"Our first year [in operation] we recycled approximately 40,000 pounds," Waters said. "Last year we recycled 70,000 pounds and this year we are expected to recycle between 90,000 to 115,000 pounds [of e-waste]."
Total Reclaim formed in 1991 and began recycling electronics in 2000. In 2002 they took the BAN Pledge.
"Remanufacturing is what you could call what we do," said Craig Lorch, co-owner of Total Reclaim.
The facility disassembles materials for proper recycling and seeks to remanufacture items that can be remarketed. A global market exists for these materials, and the company still exports some materials in compliance with the BAN pledge, Lorch said. For some materials, such as glass, there are no domestic options for recycling.
"The market for those materials is offshore," he said. "Our first choice is to recycle domestically, our second choice is developed nations, and third choice is developing nations."
Disposal service providers separate e-waste from the waste destined for landfills. According to the Whatcom County Solid Waste Division, waste collected in Whatcom County is sent to disposal service providers, which is then sent to landfills in eastern Washington and Oregon. Recycling and Disposal Services (RDS), one of the two disposal service providers in Whatcom County diverted their e-waste to proper recyclers. The company's program began recycling its e-waste in October. In the first three weeks the program recovered 173 units of e-waste, said Iris Newman, office manager at RDS.
Facilities that do recycle responsibly face economic challenges. The choice to recycle responsibly can be the difference between making money and spending money, Westervelt said.
"It's a choice between paying out of pocket to have it recycled properly and making money by selling it to a broker," she said.
A challenge that environmentally conscious companies face is to forsake profits in order to responsibly recycle their waste.
"There is a direct incentive to bring down the end of life processes. Since [manufacturers] are not allowed to charge customers for recycling, costs [of recycling] would have to be part of the price of the computer," Westervelt said. "Since they want to keep the retail price low then they would have to lower the cost of recycling and look at ways to have a more sustainable process."
However, facilities that have taken the BAN pledge, such as ReLectronics and Total Reclaim, offer consumers the option to safely recycle their electronics and the piece of mind that their electronics are not threatening the environmental safety and health of people in developing nations.