[PEN-L:32641] when computers die

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

The e-waste land

Today's throwaway culture has created a toxic timebomb - techno trash. But
will new laws deal with our mountain of unwanted computers, TVs and
toasters? Rachel Shabi reports

Saturday November 30, 2002
The Guardian

It had to end here, in an impoverished region of Asia. Once a peaceful,
rice-growing village, Guiyu, in the Guangdong province of China, has become
an electronic junkyard - a grotesque, sci-fi fusion of technology and
deprivation. Guiyu, and many places like it in India, Vietnam, Singapore and
Pakistan, is where electrical waste from the west is routinely shipped for
"recycling". Around 100,000 men, women and children in Guiyu make $1.50
(94p) a day, breaking discarded computers and other electronic goods -
mainly American, but also from the UK - into component materials of steel,
aluminium, copper, plastic and gold. This is the gloomy underside of our
glorious technology and the voracious rate at which we consume it. There is
an inevitable logic to this scenario, that the redundant products of a
hi-tech economy should end up in parts of the world too poor to protest:
"Toxic waste will always run downhill on an economic path of least
resistance," explains Jim Puckett, coordinator of the Basel Action Network
(BAN), a global environmental campaign.

BAN's documentary film, Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing Of Asia,
released in December last year, reveals what happens at the end of the
techno-waste line, in villages such as Guiyu. Sprawling mountains of wires
are gathered and burned - in the open air - to liberate the metals from
their plastic surrounds; computer and TV monitors are broken, by hand, to
extract tiny amounts of copper; circuit boards, melted over coal grills,
release valuable chips and toxic vapours. Leftover plastics are either
burned, creating piles of contaminated ash, or dumped along with other
processing residues in rivers, along irrigation canals or in fields. It is
primitive, dangerous work. Poisonous waste creeps into skin and lungs and
seeps into the land and water: Guiyu's soil contains 200 times the level of
lead considered hazardous; the drinking water is 2,400 times over the World
Health Authority (WHO) lead threshold. "We found a cyber-age nightmare,"
says Puckett. "They call this recycling, but it is really dumping by another
name."

Since the film's release, European nations have signed a ban on toxic waste
exports. However, there is no doubt that our frenzied trade in electronic
goods is creating catastrophic levels of a particularly problematic type of
trash. Known as waste from electronic and electrical goods (WEEE) in Europe
and, less pedantically, as e-waste in the US, it is the fastest-growing form
of rubbish across the western world. In Britain, we produce around 1m tonnes
of e-waste each year, set to double by 2010. White goods contribute 43% of
this figure, while IT is the next largest component at 39%. Consumer
electronics are next on the list at 8%, with TVs accounting for most of
that: we bin two million each year, and this will increase sharply as people
switch first to digital, then to flatscreen sets. This waste stream lurched
into the foreground in January this year, when we learned that mountains of
discarded fridges were piling up in council storage, waiting to be processed
in CFC extraction plants that had yet to be built. (The government hadn't
reacted in time to a new EU law, requiring that CFCs be removed from the
foam in fridges prior to their disposal.) The most striking thing about this
scenario, apart from the administrative sluggishness that created it, was
the sheer volume of the pile-up: between January and June this year - the
month the processing plants finally went into action - around 1.3 million
fridges were amassed.

Electronic goods, once durable items that would be passed down the family
tree, are now disposable components of a throwaway culture. Labour and
materials are underpriced, while technology rushes electrical appliances
into obsolescence, constantly putting goods out of date, or creating the imp
ression that if you don't keep up, you will be. These factors collide to
create a market where it is cheaper and easier to buy new and more often, as
anyone who has tried to upgrade a computer or repair a toaster will testify.
Meanwhile, market saturation of now standard domestic goods - virtually all
households have fridges, TVs and washing machines - has prompted a shift in
our perception of electrical items, from nondescript appliances to
fashion-driven artefacts. "It's the makeover culture that we've seen in the
past 10 to 15 years," says Erika Calvo, environmental sociologist at the
University of East London. "If your fridge doesn't look right, you change
it."

Of the mountains of discarded electrical goods we generate, only a fraction
are given a second life. Resale outlets are small and, with no regulating
standards to guide us, we're suspicious of the second-hand market for
products with an electrical current. There are schemes that redistribute
working appliances to low-income households, but still too few of them.
Meanwhile, the IT recycling market is flourishing, but not fast enough to
cope with computer obsolescence. "If you've got a low-end Pentium II or
less, even the charities wouldn't want it," says David Walker, managing
director of Tech Waste, an IT recycling company. Britain does have a good
trade in scrap metal; a washing machine will yield about 50p-worth of steel,
which makes it just about worth the effort. But when you factor into the
equation anything that has a plug or a battery - from cookers to electric
toothbrushes and musical socks - around 90% of e-waste currently ends up
buried or burned.

Both these methods are bad news. Electrical goods comprise an unholy mix of
heavy metals, of the sort that shouldn't be placed anywhere near soil, water
or living things. Some examples: lead, a soldering agent, and also used in
cathode ray tubes in computer and TV monitors; cadmium, found in plastics;
mercury in switches and lamps; arsenic in circuit boards - all toxic and, in
some cases, known carcinogens. Also, plastics and flame-retardants (which
coat electric appliances) release chlorine and dioxins when burned or
exposed to water. "We don't know the impact of long-term, low-level exposure
to these substances," says Dr Paul Johnston, principal scientist at the
Greenpeace International Research Laboratory. "Any process that puts them
into the environment should be treated with a great deal of suspicion."

But what else can be done? Electrical goods are not easy to dispose of,
quite simply because they aren't designed to be. These products are multiple
hybrids of metal, plastic, glass and composite components: a video recorder,
for example, is mainly plastic, while a TV, placed in the same waste
category, is mainly glass, and a computer is a jumble of everything.
Dismantling these goods is therefore both costly and cumbersome: "It's a bit
like unbaking bread back to its ingredients," says Gary Griffiths,
environmental manager for computer refurbishers, RDC, who has spent the past
decade looking at this issue.

Even getting these goods into a recycling system in the first place is
troublesome. Big retailers run take-back schemes to pick up old appliances
(not fridges, currently) when they deliver new ones, but such sales account
for less than 50% of the market. Local authorities will collect large items,
but can take weeks and charge anything up to £30. Conscientious car-owners
may drive unwanted electrical goods to the nearest civic amenity site, aka,
the tip, but the dumped cookers and computers found on the streets of any
large city would indicate that fly-tipping, although illegal, is a popular
route.

It's one hell of a mess to clean up, but impending Euro regulations mean
that we're going to have to. In October, the European parliament passed a
fistful of laws - to take effect from 2004 - banning untreated e-waste from
landfill, banning most hazardous materials from electronic goods, setting
recycling and recovery figures for e-waste and, crucially, shifting the onus
of waste-disposal on to the producers of these goods. Environmental
campaigners think the reforms innovative, far-reaching and likely to prompt
a tectonic shift in recycling culture. This being European legislation,
however, it is also dense, vague and brain-crushingly dull for anyone not
involved with or avidly interested in the fate of electronic waste. Even
then, it's a stretch: "The directive is long-winded, bureaucratic and
time-consuming," says Mike Childs, policy adviser for Friends Of The Earth,
adding that the laws have been in discussion for more than eight years.

The murkiest and most debated aspect of the WEEE directive is the area of
producer responsibility, itself a radical principle in that it shifts
accountability to the creators, rather than the consumers, of electronic
goods. "Taxpayers have historically picked up the waste disposal burden, and
so the EC is now passing the buck - quite literally - to producers," says
Griffiths. Doubtless, the producers will pass the buck straight back to
consumers, but the theory is that if producers have to pay for collection
and proper disposal of their products, they then have a strong financial
incentive to design electrical items with this objective in mind.

Everyone agrees that producers should, by way of a cross-subsidy,
collectively pick up the tab for old or "historic" waste. Financing for
disposal of future waste, however, was the main problem. Both industry and
environmental groups were, perhaps for the first time, united in approval of
individual responsibility, arguing that if producers aren't separately held
to account for their brands, the competitive incentive to develop
eco-friendly technology is thrown away. A joint statement from European NGOs
and electronics companies, including Apple, Fujitsu, ICL plc, Nokia, Sanyo
and several industry groups, urged the EC to "support financing on an
individual basis". European parliament agrees; only the UK tried to block
it. While accusations of monolithic thinking, typical British belligerence
and a pro-business bias abounded, the government's response was that it was
fighting for flexibility. A spokesperson at the DTI said, "We are against
compulsory IPR [Individual Producer Responsibility], which we believe would
restrict the freedom of obligated companies to decide for themselves the
approach that suits them best." DTI officials added that small electrical
goods companies (the musical sock makers?) were not represented by the
industry bodies that lobby on this issue.

Despite British objections, individual responsibility was built into the
WEEE directive agreed in October. It will affect every permutation of how
products are collected, tracked and treated, not to mention by whom and at
whose expense.

The difference of approach between Britain and the rest of Europe is
consistent with the UK tradition of underpinning recycling measures with
economic incentives, in contrast to the European social-democratic model of
recycling as an obligation. Norway, for example, is already meeting the WEEE
targets on recycling, while Britain sits at the bottom end of European
recycling league tables.

Either way, producer responsibility is a new parameter of thinking. In
practice, this could go beyond the level of simply making electrical items
easier to dismantle, a process that Griffiths describes as "using clips
instead of bolts, screws and not glues". It may herald a shift in the focus
of technological design, from fast, compact and funky to resource-friendly
and reusable. "We already have initiatives, such as recycling of plastics in
PlayStations, use of PET [Polyethylene Terephthalate - plastic] bottles in
new products, and technology research such as plastics identification to
improve recycling," says Dr Kieren Mayers, manager of the Sony Environmental
Centre, Europe, who was banking on incentives for design which would enable
them to go further. According to Melissa Shinn, policy adviser at the
European Environmental Bureau (EEB), one possible outcome will be that,
presented with the potentially cumbersome obligation of a goods disposal
process, producers will track appliances in a completely different way. "It
could lead to a shift from product to concept, so that you buy the service
of, say, watching TV and not the actual TV. It would de-link the economy of
business from material use to service use," she says.

But there are criticisms of the WEEE directive as well as rosy future
scenarios. The recycling targets to eliminate e-waste from landfill,
although a welcome principle, are an area of contention. These targets,
effective from January 2006, require that 75% of e-waste is recovered (ie,
not landfilled), of which 65% should be recycled. That isn't good enough,
according to some. "Given that the amount of WEEE is set to double by 2010,
this means that the same amount now being disposed of to landfill and
incineration may continue," says Griffiths. Moreover, the shortfall between
recycle and recovery figures leaves 10% of e-waste that must be collected,
cannot be used as landfill and does not have to be recycled. That's pretty
much a green light to burn it.

"We don't want any excuse for member states to be justified in increasing
incinerator capacity, which is a long-term commitment and will divert
funding from recycling," says Melissa Shinn of the EEB. Arguably, a total
ban on landfilling or burning e-waste would have been a better solution,
although Griffiths suggests a reason why this route has not been taken: "I
have been told by civil servants in Brussels that the political imperative
is to have measurable targets," he says. "A 100% ban is not a measurable
target." Which is just Eurospeak, I take it, for a ban is not politically
possible.

Indeed, some have argued that the focus on recycling is misguided: there is
little point in amassing recycled material unless there is a tax incentive
or a legal obligation to use it (a law imposing the latter is in the EU
pipeline). Tim Cooper, head of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption, says
that recycling may even reinforce a throwaway culture by signalling that it
is OK to discard and replace with frequency. "Through recycling, industry
can say, 'We have an environmental mission and policy', and still carry on
perpetuating the growth in consumption," he says. Cooper thinks that the
WEEE directive missed an opportunity to impose life-span labelling
requirements on the electronics industry. Such a measure would let consumers
differentiate more accurately between, say, a cheap toaster and a
top-of-the-range Dualit. There would then be some emphasis on durability,
which is far higher up the list of good green practice.

A perverse effect of the imminent WEEE directive is that, as more material
is collected for recycling, it may create a greater demand to export e-waste
illegally, to a weaker economy for dirty recycling. This, according to BAN,
has been the experience in the States. European nations have signed a total
ban on toxic waste exports - the US refuses to do so - but there are doubts
as to whether it is being enforced. A spokesperson for the Scottish
Environmental Protection Agency says: "We know of companies who may be doing
that type of business." Since Europe agreed to stop exports, the BAN team
has been back to China and reports that, while most e-waste comes from the
US, it is still "flowing out of Europe". (BAN suspects that European waste
more often ends up in India and Pakistan.)

The worry is that customs officials are not yet aware of the definitions of
hazardous waste, and that the infrastructure to check all seagoing
containers does not exist. "So much harm has come under the green passport
of recycling," says Puckett. "Whenever someone says that word, it has the
effect of making people swoon and think that everything is going to be
lovely." In places such as Guiyu, everything is far from lovely.