LIKE many others, Babbage is reluctant to throw out old computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, phones and other digital paraphernalia. Where possible, he guts them of useful parts, and leaves the carcasses in a cupboard in case other bits and pieces may one day also come in handy. For instance, the last computer he built, Bitza-7, was assembled almost exclusively from salvaged components (see “Say farewell to XP”, September 6th 2013). Recently, though, he decided a clear-out was overdue, and hauled the accumulated e-waste off to the local toxic dump.
Putting anything containing even a printed circuit board in the rubbish bin for municipal collection is out of the question. Not counting all the other nasty materials used in electronic products, the lead in the soldered joints alone requires such items to be treated as toxic waste. At least, that is the case in California.
Babbage’s nearest recycling centre is no backstreet scrapyard, belching fumes from makeshift incinerators and open baths of bubbling acid—like several he has seen in the third world. Open to the public several days a week, the toxic dump in question is part of the University of California, Los Angeles, set up to handle waste from the institution’s medical centre and numerous laboratories. Visitors are greeted by staff in hazmat overalls and rubber gloves, who carefully sort the offerings into different bins. The overall impression is that the waste is in safe hands.
Or so one hopes. According to a United Nations initiative known as StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem), e-waste can contain up to 60 elements from the periodic table, as well as flame retardants and other nasty chemicals. Apart from heavy metals such as lead and mercury, there are quantities of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium and gobs of polyvinyl chloride. All of these pose hazards to the health of those handling them.
When burned at low temperature, the brominated flame retardants used in circuit boards and casings create additional toxins, including hologenated dioxins and furans—some of the most toxic substances known. These can cause cancer, reproductive disorders, endocrine disruption and numerous other health problems. Meanwhile, the heavy metals released by incineration can accumulate in the food chain (especially in fish) and come back to haunt future generations.
Even with a pristine collection centre like UCLA’s, there is no guarantee that the e-waste will be processed responsibly once it has passed downstream. Tracing what happens to it after it has been trucked to a processing centre is not the easiest undertaking. What little is known about recycling hazardous waste generally in America suggests that only 15% to 20% of it is actually recycled; the rest gets incinerated or buried in landfills, says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
But where? With few audits undertaken, even the EPA has to rely on assumptions and guesswork. Greenpeace occasionally does spot-checks on suspicious shipments. But most observers agree that around 20% of the 9m tonnes of e-waste collected each year in America is processed domestically—either by reputable firms under controlled conditions, or by prison inmates with few, if any, handling requirements. In other words, the bulk of the stuff—up to 80% by weight—gets exported to places in China, India and Africa, where health and safety regulations barely exist or are loosely enforced.
Such exports are banned in Europe, but remain legal in America. The United States is the only developed country that has refused to ratify the 1989 Basel Convention, an international treaty controlling the export of hazardous waste from wealthy countries to poorer ones. America has also refused, along with Canada and Japan, to accept the Basel Convention’s 1995 amendment that imposes an outright ban on such trade.
There have been repeated attempts in Congress to pass legislation that would make it illegal to send toxic waste to other countries. The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act of 2013 failed to gain a consensus. A similar act, introduced in March 2014, remains stuck in the Senate.
Not that the Europeans behave all that ethically. Inspections of 18 European seaports in 2005 found nearly half the e-waste destined for export was actually illegal. Shippers use various tricks to circumvent the Basel ban. For instance, waste labelled as goods for refurbishing or reuse can pass muster, even if it gets incinerated or dumped in landfills on arrival.
Chinese authorities tried, unsuccessfully, to put a stop to such false labeling back in 2000, by banning all imports of e-waste, whatever their intended use. Today, Guiyu, a city in Guangdong province, is the e-waste capital of the world. There, glass-to-glass recycling of computer monitors and television sets costs a tenth of what it does in America. Cathode-ray tubes, with their high concentrations of lead and chemically hazardous phosphors, are the most difficult of all e-waste to process. With an abundance of recycled glass from CRTs, China has become a leading exporter of bottles and jars.
The e-waste industry in Guiyu is said to employ 150,000 people, including large numbers of children, disassembling old computers, phones and other devices by hand to recover whatever metals and parts that can be resold. Circuit boards are soaked in acid to dissolve out the lead, cadmium and other metals. Plastic cases are ground into pellets, and copper wiring is stripped of its plastic coating. Anything not salvageable is burned.
The air pollution and contamination of the local water supply in Guiyu are said to be horrendous. A medical researcher from nearby Shantou University found concentrations of lead in the blood of local children to be on average 49% over the maximum safe level. The highest concentrations were in children living in homes with workshops for recycling circuit boards on the premises.
India is fast becoming another big dumping ground for Western e-waste. Greenpeace reckons there are 25,000 workers employed in recycling computers, phones and other hardware in Delhi alone, where up to 20,000 tonnes of e-waste are processed a year. The preferred method for recycling circuit boards is to toss them into an open fire—to melt the plastics and burn away everything but the gold and copper. Similar recycling dumps have been found in Mumbai, Bangalore and several other cities.
With the global mountain of e-waste growing bigger by 8% a year, the 20m-50m tonnes the EPA reckoned was produced globally in 2009 could easily reach 100m tonnes by 2020. What can concerned citizens in developed regions do to help? To be honest, not much at the moment. Recycling in an environmentally sound manner is expensive. Given the present situation, it is always going to be cheaper to dump unwanted electronic goods in poorer parts of the planet.
The cost of recycling e-waste in America would, of course, come down if responsible firms doing the work had access to greater volumes of electronic trash. And the only way that is likely to happen is if laws were introduced that imposed stiff penalties on the export of e-waste, or at least to let manufacturers include a fee in the price of electronic goods (as happens with cans and bottles of drinks) to offset the cost of taking them back for reprocessing when their useful lives were over.
In the meantime, all Babbage can recommend is that anyone needing to dispose of an old television set, an obsolete computer or even a refrigerator is to find a recycler who is an accredited member of one or other of the EPA’s two voluntary certification schemes: E-Stewards and Responsible Recycling Practices (R2). Use this map on EPA's website to find their nearest certified recycler.
Apologists argue that sending toxic rubbish abroad helps put food on the table of the impoverished. While others may think differently, Babbage is not convinced that the short-term economic benefits outweigh the long-term health and environmental costs imposed on such communities. He believes people, especially those in wealthier parts of the world, should do their own dirty work, and pay the full cost of doing so themselves.
