Après Nous, la Déluge

Tis now the season for contemplating the number of "updated" electronic items given and received as holiday gifts during this past week. The heap of PCs, laptops, printers, VCRs, televisions, cell phones of all sizes and abilities, iPods, MP3s, BlackBerries, handheld computers and personal organizers, to name some, though hardly all, of them. What now will happen to the "old" ones these have replaced? Will they join the vast stream of "e-waste" which has now become a little-thought-about peril to the planet? If you are one of the millions of Americans who upgrades and updates electronic equipment with ever-growing frequency, please take a minute to find out what happens to the discards.

From an ABC News report that appeared the day after Christmas and is now making the rounds of environmental sites, One Man's Trash Doesn't Necessarily Become Another Man's Treasure,

Ah, the smell of bright, shiny new plastic as you unwrap that hot little iPod nano on Christmas morning. Hard to believe that a year from now, when you outgrow it and ask Santa for a new one, it could end up as part of a mountain of stinking castoff electronic gadgets, polluting someone's drinking water on the other side of the world...

Studies estimate that 315 million to 600 million desktop and laptop computers in the U.S. will become obsolete over the next 18 months. That's the equivalent of a 22-story pile of e-waste covering the entire city of Los Angeles. (My emphasis.) Old PCs and TVs make up the fastest-growing portion of our waste stream, according to the coalition. Add to that the millions of cell phones, whose size has shrunk as fast as their life span, and the now seemingly clunky TVs along with printers and that soon-to-be-retired VCR player, and the pile of junk keeps on growing.

I know we think of our laptops, cells, and TVs as our friends and lifelines, but these gadgets contain an astonishing amount of hazardous waste, including neurotoxins and carcinogins such as PCBs and PBDEs (flame retardants). Toxic heavy metals including lead, silver, cadmium, antimony, mercury, selenium, chromium, and beryllium inhabit the innards of our electronic toys. Computer monitors and TV cathode ray tubes may contain as much as five to eight pounds of lead, making technology products now responsible for as much as forty percent of the lead in our landfills, according to the EPA.

We are so isolated from our wastestreams in this country, that it may not occur to even socially and environmentally responsible citizens to wonder what happens to our electronic trash. We set it out for the trash pickup, and miraculously it disappears! When my printer gave up the ghost, I took it to the computer wizards in our podunk town, and was told - "ah, throw it out. It would cost more to fix than to buy a new one." They told me the same thing at Staples. I brought it home, fed it chicken soup, talked to it nicely, fiddled around trying various things - and finally got it working again.

The afterlife of our technological innovation is truly horrible. As with nuclear waste, e-waste has become a monster that lives on, seemingly forever. In years past, most of our e-waste has gone to Asia, where it is stored in huge heaps and piles, and eventually dismantled. That which can be recycled is recycled, that which cannot be reused is finally disposed of. This process of storage, component separation, plastic shredding, acid processing/leaching, open burning, and residue dumping, provides work for thousands of poor Chinese and Indian workers in workshops and storage facilities awash in carcinagous dust and materials.

The entire picture is laid out for us, with photos, in this Greenpeace report: Recycling of Electronic Wastes in China and India: Workplace and Environmental Contamination. The workers are constantly exposed to these toxins, which also are constantly being washed into the soil, streams and rivers in the workshop countries. Add to that the fact that many of those wading, picking, disassembling through the piles of e-refuse are children, and you have an ongoing toxin epidemic.

In a previous paragraph I say "in years past," but much of this continues into the present time. The United States is the only major industrialized nation not to have signed on to the Basel Convention, something I had not known about until I began researching this article. Here is the full description of the Convention from the Basel Action Network:

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was adopted in Basel, Switzerland on 22 March 1989.
The Convention was initiated in response to numerous international scandals
regarding hazardous waste trafficking that began to occur in the late 1980s. The
Convention entered into force on 5 May 1992 and today has its Secretariat in
Geneva, Switzerland. For an up-to-date list of Basel Convention Parties see the Country Status Table.

Not only have we not signed this Convention, we are the only developed country in the world that fails to control or prohibit toxic trade. In some cases we are even working with technology manufacturers to undermine the terms of the Convention, a situation which has earned us our place in BAN's Hall of Shame. In a total aside note here I want to pass along an astonishing fact I learned in this research - that the U.S. government turns over 10,000 computers a week. That's almost 500,000 computers into the waste stream from the government alone.

I have accumulated a large amount of information on this subject, too much for one post. So I will return to the subject of recycling e-waste in a subsequent posting. We have recycled earlier versions of cell phones to battered womens' shelters, via the phone companies themselves, but I have a monitor, keyboard and speakers that have been waiting in a corner of the room for three years now, waiting for the day I find a way to truly recycle them. This is bound to be a universal problem.

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