[A-List] High-Tech Wasteland

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's the information age - so why don't we know how to discard a laptop
safely?

by Elizabeth Grossman

Orion magazine (July / August 2004)


THE SCENARIO IS FAMILIAR. The day arrives when the computer that was
going to be your personal bridge to the twenty-first century has become
a dinosaur. The salesperson who touted that machine's efficiency now
explains in tones of pity and derision just how far from the cutting
edge of technology you are. The only solution is a new computer. And so,
in early 2001, when it became clear that my old laptop could not handle
most websites and could not be upgraded, it had to go. I tried to find
someone who wanted a Macintosh 5300c, but no one was interested in a
computer that couldn't surf the web without crashing.

Thanks to our appetite for gadgets, convenience, and innovation (and the
current system of world commerce that makes them relatively affordable),
Americans now own some two billion pieces of consumer electronics. For
over two decades, rapid technological advances have doubled the
computing capacity of semiconductor chips almost every eighteen months,
bringing us faster computers, smaller cell phones, more efficient
machinery and appliances, and an increasing demand for new products.
With some five million to seven million tons of this stuff becoming
obsolete in the US each year, high-tech electronics are now the fastest
growing part of the municipal waste stream. For the most part we have
been so bedazzled by figuring out how to use the new PC, PDA, TV, DVD
player, or cell phone, that until recently we haven't given this waste
much thought.

FROM MY DESK IN PORTLAND, the tap of a few keys on my laptop sends a
message to Hong Kong, retrieves articles filed in Brussels, displays
pictures of my nieces in New York, and plays the song of a wood stork
recorded in Florida. Traveling with my laptop and cell phone, I have
access to a whole world of information and personal communication - a
world that, as electricity grids, phone towers, and wireless networks
proliferate, exists with diminishing regard for geography. This universe
of instant information, conversation, and entertainment is so powerful
and absorbing - and its currency so physically ephemeral - that it's
hard to remember that the technology that makes it possible has anything
to do with the natural world.

But this digital wizardry relies on a complex array of materials -
metals, elements, plastics, and chemical compounds. Each tidy piece of
equipment has a story that begins in mines, refineries, factories,
rivers, and aquifers, and ends on pallets and in dumpsters, smelters,
and landfills all around the world.

Where the garbage goes, where a plume of smoke travels, where waste
flows and settles when it is washed downstream, how human communities,
wildlife, and the landscape respond to the waste - these are costs that
are traditionally left off the industrial balance sheet, and which
industry is now just beginning to figure into the cost of doing
business. As Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network (BAN), a
nonprofit environmental advocacy group that tracks the global travels of
hazardous waste, has said, "Humans have this funny idea that when you
get rid of something, it's gone". The high-tech industry is no exception.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than two
million tons of high-tech electronics are dumped in US landfills each
year, and only about ten percent of discarded personal computers are
recycled. The EPA expects at least 200 million televisions to be
discarded between 2003 and 2010, 250 million computers to become
obsolete in the next five years, and 65,000 tons of used and broken cell
phones to accumulate by 2005. And these numbers are for the US alone.

What makes this waste so problematic is that compared to the items we're
used to recycling, high-tech electronics are a particularly complex kind
of trash. Soda cans, bottles, and newspapers are made of one or no more
than a few materials. High-tech electronics contain dozens of tightly
packed substances, which complicates separation and recycling. Many of
the substances are harmful to human and environmental health.

The cathode ray tubes (CRTs) in computer and television monitors contain
lead, a well-documented neurotoxin, as do printed circuit boards.
Mercury, another neurotoxin, is used to light flat-panel display
screens. Some batteries and circuit boards contain cadmium, a recognized
carcinogen. Polyvinyl chloride, a plastic used to insulate wires,
generates dioxins and furans - both persistent organic pollutants - when
burned. Brominated flame retardants, some of which have been documented
to disrupt thyroid hormone function and act as neurotoxins in animals,
are used in plastics that house electronics. Some of these flame
retardants have been found in the breast milk of women across the US,
and in marine mammals around the globe. Copper, beryllium, barium, zinc,
chromium, silver, and nickel are among the other toxic and hazardous
substances used in high-tech electronics. These materials do not pose
hazards while the equipment is intact, but when it is trashed they
become a huge problem.

Scientists are just beginning to quantify precisely how the toxic
ingredients of high-tech electronics may be leaching into the
environment via landfills, unregulated dumping, and crude recycling that
can involve open burning of plastics and other materials. But it's clear
from studies undertaken around the world that these substances are
present in groundwater, accumulating in the marine food web, and
traveling as airborne particles. A 2001 EPA report estimated that
discarded electronics, or e-waste, account for approximately seventy
percent of the heavy metals and forty percent of the lead now found in
US landfills.

So where does the e-waste go? Where should it go? Despite electronics'
toxic contents, the US - unlike a half-dozen or more other countries -
has no national legislation regulating e-waste disposal and no national
system for electronics recycling. The EPA considers discarded
electronics hazardous waste. But unless your state or local government
bans specific electronic components (such as CRTs) or the materials they
contain - and unless you're dumping over 220 pounds of e-waste a month
(a federal violation) - it's perfectly legal to toss it with the rest of
your trash. Curbside recycling bins are given the once-over before being
pitched into the truck, but no one picks through your trash on its way
to the dump. Consumer education and conscience are often the only
safeguards against putting small quantities of hazardous waste into the bin.

If I'd dumped my old laptop in the trash, it would have been eventually
trucked out to a landfill in eastern Oregon. If I took an old Macintosh
out of my closet today and shipped it to the manufacturer's designated
recycler, it would end up in a shredder in California. But first it
would be dismantled, assuming the equipment cannot be reused or
refurbished as is. The recycler separates certain components -
batteries, CRTs, mercury elements, and some plastics - for special
handling and hazardous materials recovery. The remainder, including
circuit boards, is shredded, and later melted and smelted to extract the
valuable metals, primarily copper and gold, for resale and reuse.

However, the way electronics are designed makes their disassembly and
materials recycling cumbersome and expensive. This is especially true of
older, obsolete equipment now making its way into the waste stream. So
despite laws intended to prevent the export of hazardous waste, there's
a good chance that had I deposited my computer in a used electronics
collection facility, it might have been loaded onto a ship bound for
China, following what Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network calls "the
economic path of least resistance".

A woman squats over an open flame in a backyard workshop. In the pan she
holds over the fire, a plastic and metal circuit board begins to melt
into a smoky, noxious stew. With bare hands she plucks out the chips.
Another woman wields a hammer and cracks the back of an old monitor to
remove the copper yoke. The lead-laden glass is tossed onto a riverside
pile. Nearby, a man wearing no protective clothing sluices a pan of acid
over a pile of computer chips, releasing a puff of steam. When the
chemical vapor clears, a small fleck of gold will emerge. Another worker
crouches over a pile of broken ink cartridges, brushing the carbon black
out by hand. A child stands on a pile of smashed electronics, eating an
apple. At night, thick black dioxin-laden smoke rises from a mountain of
burning wires, whose plastic insulation melts to expose the valuable
copper within.

These images of Guiyu, a southern Chinese city, are from a film called
Exporting Harm, produced by BAN and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition,
a group that's been watchdogging the computer industry for more than
twenty years. Released in 2002, the film shows the city filled with
enormous mounds of trashed electronics piled in open heaps: computer
parts of all sorts, monitors, keyboards, wires, printers, cartridges,
fax machines, and circuit boards - all imported from throughout the
developed world for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling. The city's
water has been rendered undrinkable, the soil poisoned, and its river
polluted with heavy concentrations of dioxins, as well as lead, barium,
chromium, and other heavy metals.

Jim Puckett calls this e-waste the "effluent of the affluent". According
to Exporting Harm's estimates for early 2002, some fifty to eighty
percent of the electronics collected for recycling in the western half
of the United States were being exported for cheap dismantling overseas,
predominantly in China and Southeast Asia. The film's footage, which
includes pictures of equipment ID tags reading "Property of the City of
Los Angeles" and "State of California Medical Facility", startled
officials from states around the country.

No one wants to see their state's name on equipment handled by workers
who might earn two dollars a day toiling under hazardous conditions, or
to risk the liabilities of improper toxic-waste disposal. Consequently,
the past few years have seen a flurry of state e-waste regulation bills.
In 2003 alone, more than fifty bills were introduced in more than two
dozen states. Meanwhile, in the absence of national legislation, a group
of electronics manufacturers, government agencies, and nongovernmental
organizations is negotiating the National Product Stewardship
Initiative, which would create a nationwide policy for dealing with used
and obsolete electronics.

For now, a patchwork of different programs addresses e-waste. Some
states have banned CRTs from landfills. Others will bar specific
hazardous substances from products sold in the state. Some have
initiated recycling programs - both ongoing and one-day collection
events. Others have created task forces to recommend further action.
Meanwhile, electronics manufacturers are carrying on with existing
voluntary take-back schemes and developing new ones.

Under California's recently passed electronics recycling bill,
collections will begin with a fee based on screen size. Iowa began its
electronics recycling program with one-day collection events that
charged five dollars per item. Over 275 Massachusetts cities and towns
now collect electronics for recycling - many at curbside. And community
websites often announce upcoming collection events. But that nifty new
PC or PDA does not yet come with end-of-life instructions.

Large-scale purchasers - corporations, governments, schools, hospitals -
are now returning most used equipment to manufacturers. But none of the
take-back programs up and running has the capacity to capture the vast
amount of e-waste generated by households and small businesses, over
ninety percent of which is currently not recycled.

Electronic waste - indeed, all trash and recycling in the US - is
regulated and financed by local governments and taxpayers. But e-waste
is expensive to handle and piling up fast. According to research by a
coalition of US nonprofit groups, the cost of collecting and processing
this waste from 2006 to 2015 - not counting cleanup of contamination
from improperly managed e-waste - will exceed ten billion dollars.

Because of these costs, consumer groups, environmental advocates, and
local governments have begun to question a basic assumption about
handling the waste. "All the parts of a product's lifecycle that involve
making money, being profitable, are considered the realm of the private
sector", says Sego Jackson, solid-waste planner for Snohomish County,
Washington. "But as soon as that product has lost its value, it crosses
some magic line where it becomes the government's responsibility.
Clearly we need a different kind of system."

In the US, that need has spawned the Computer Take Back Campaign, an
effort to further involve manufacturers in the recycling of electronics.
Launched in 2001 by a coalition of nonprofits that includes the
GrassRoots Recycling Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the
campaign is helping communities craft legislation to control the hazards
of e-waste, and is working with manufacturers and retailers on
collection events. "Our biggest allies in this campaign are local
governments", says David Wood, executive director of the GrassRoots
Recycling Network.

High-tech electronics are resource-intensive to produce, lose value
quickly, and are expensive to dispose of - a "dysfunctional" cycle,
according to Sego Jackson. He has his own test for what would be
functional: "It should be as easy to recycle a computer as it is to buy
one". But reaching that goal will require "a fundamental paradigm
shift", says Jim Puckett. At the heart of this shift is the idea that
end-of-product-life costs and responsibilities - traditionally borne by
consumers, taxpayers, government, and the environment - should be
shouldered by the manufacturer.

This concept, known as Extended Producer Responsibility, is new to
Americans but in use across Europe, where it will soon be applied to
electronics. The European Union recently passed legislation requiring
electronics manufacturers to take back and facilitate the recycling of
used products, in a system financed by "advanced recovery" fees attached
to the price of new equipment. If revenues from the fees fail to cover
the recycling costs, producers have to absorb the difference. The system
provides an incentive to design products for easier, cheaper recycling.
A companion piece of legislation will require manufacturers to eliminate
some hazardous substances from new equipment.

Because Europe is a significant market for consumer electronics, US
companies, including Dell, HP, and IBM, will be making products to meet
EU requirements. And given the industry's global manufacturing and
distribution efficiencies, those products will be sold worldwide.

To meet the EU regulations, engineers are rushing to find alternatives
to lead solder now used in computers, and to eliminate certain flame
retardants. And as companies fall under growing pressure to conserve
resources and reduce toxics, they are moving away from piecemeal
elimination of undesirables and toward redesign. Mercury, for example,
is highly toxic and expensive to dispose of. As HP environmental product
steward Nathan Moin explains, the company could rework the current
design of flat panel display screens to make it easier to remove the
mercury lamp now used. But it will be more efficient to design a new
lighting device that eliminates mercury altogether. This is an example
of what architect William McDonough, coauthor of Cradle to Cradle:
Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002), describes as going beyond the
"less bad approach" of reducing and eliminating individual toxics, to
addressing the problem holistically.

IMAGINE WHAT IT would be like if upgrading software meant not having to
buy a whole new computer, but simply snapping in a new processor. Or if
printers and other accessories were universally compatible. Imagine if
the price of a new laptop or mobile phone covered the cost of a
convenient system to collect old equipment for reuse or recycling.
Imagine if that price guaranteed a living wage in safe conditions to
those engaged in every step of electronics disassembly, materials
recovery, and manufacturing. Imagine if there were no such thing as garbage.

The high-tech industry is one of the first that is being pushed to
internalize its costs, a move that will have fundamental implications
for other industries as well. These changes will not mean that the
economy or high-tech innovation will come to a screeching halt. There
will still be commerce, education, entertainment, electronic love
letters, and wireless calls to far-flung friends and family, but it
won't be business as usual.

Meanwhile, my old printer, laptop, cell phone, and Zip drive are still
in the closet, even though I now know where they should go. As for my
old Macintosh 5300C, I believe it ended its useful life in an apartment
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood where I once
recycled an old TV by taking it down to the street, where it was
immediately carted off by a passer-by who said, "Hey, can I have that?"

To learn more: The Basel Action Network, 206/652-5555, www.ban.org;
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 408/287-6707, www.svtc.org.

This article has been abridged for the web.High-Tech Wasteland


_____

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Watershed: The Undamming of America
(2002) and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (2003). Her
recent book, about the environmental impacts of the high technology
industry and its products, was published in 2005 by Island Press. See
http://www.hightechtrash.com/ . She lives near the Willamette River in
Portland, Oregon.


http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/142/

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