If you’re like millions of Americans, chances are there’s an old cell phone, TV or computer sitting idle at home or work.

How to get rid of electronic waste, or e-waste is a burgeoning global problem. The gadgets that define modern life — pretty much anything that plugs in or beeps — may seem perfectly harmless when they are working. But once thrown away, their guts — full of toxic metals such as lead and mercury — can seep from landfills into rivers and lakes.

Recycling is marketed as a responsible way to discard household trash, but environmental watchdogs are sounding the alarm that e-waste recycling is the technology industry’s dirty little secret.

“The word ‘recycling,’ has become a passport to hell,” said Jim Puckett, founder of Basel Action Network (BAN), an activist group working to prevent toxic materials from being exported to poorer countries. People who dismantle e-waste in poorer countries generally lack protection from the hazardous materials. “E-waste just goes across the border as soon as you stamp recycling on it. It just makes no sense from a toxicological or environmental standpoint,” Puckett said.

BAN takes its name from the Basel Convention, an international agreement that bans developed countries from exporting hazardous wastes to developing countries for any reason, including recycling. Puckett said the United States is the only developed country in the world not to sign the Convention.

According to a BAN report, 50 to 80 percent of the material domestic e-waste recyclers receive is simply exported, without being recycled or reprocessed.

“They take stuff and they may split it up and dismantle it very crudely and then send the circuit boards, monitors and plastic to various destinations,” Puckett said. “More often than not, those are in Asia.”

Toxic Trash

Cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are the guts inside standard TV or computer monitors. An average CRT has about five to 10 pounds of lead, depending on its size. Lead — plus smaller amounts of mercury, cadmium and other toxic metals — is also in computer chips and circuit boards that run electronic devices.

High levels of ingested lead cause brain damage, and a University of Florida study using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards concluded that CRTs thrown away in landfills leach lead at levels exceeding regulatory limits for hazardous waste. Mercury, a neurotoxin, poses a particular threat to a developing fetus, and when ingested at high levels may result in attention deficit disorder and autism.

Only a fraction of e-waste is recycled: about two to 10 percent, according to the Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition, a nonprofit group working to improve the environmental health and safety practices of the global electronics industry.

Puckett has traveled to China, where he said mountains of e-waste are polluting the environment — partially from what he calls “dirty recyclers” who simply ship old electronics overseas. Those who pay to have electronics recycled believe they’re doing the right thing, expecting toxic materials in their old TVs or computers will be disposed of properly.

“So many people think it’s as everybody says, ‘we’re going to recycle.’ You could say it’s a form of recycling — what happens in China,” Puckett said, “but, my God, it gives recycling a terrible, terrible name.”

Puckett said he saw Chinese villages where the local economy depends on processing e-waste from North America, Japan and other developed countries. It was easy to tell where e-waste came from, he said, because the institutional labels of banks, schools and hospitals were still on the machines. In some of these villages, Puckett said water samples measured lead levels at 2,400 times higher than World Health Organization drinking water guidelines.

“There’s just lead rife throughout that whole area,” Puckett said, where people burn computer chips, circuit boards and wires to salvage precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium. What’s left is dumped into nearby streams or rivers, carrying lead into the water. Burning e-waste also emits lead into the air.

More Where That Came From

Estimates vary widely on how much e-waste exists, but technology advances are prompting consumers to replace TVs and computers at increasing rates. Many old electronics sit idly in attics and garages for months or years before people eventually discard them.

The National Recycling Coalition, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, predicts 500 million U.S. computers are bound for the waste stream by 2007. That’s equivalent to about 1.58 billion pounds of lead, or the weight of 250,000 Hummer H2 trucks.
Michigan is among 29 states considering e-waste legislation. Maine, Massachusetts, California and Minnesota already ban CRTs from landfills. California’s law was the first to ban e-waste from being exported to foreign countries with weaker environmental protections. A bill that passed the Michigan House, but remained stalled in a Senate committee when this article went to press, proposes a ban on most TVs and computer monitors from Michigan dumps, starting in 2006.

“Right now, we’re throwing hazardous waste into non-hazardous landfills,” said the bill’s sponsor, Chris Kolb, D-Ann Arbor. “The future cost is lead leaching through the air, water and soil. We need to look at how to dispose and recycle these materials.”

But Dan Batts, president of the Michigan Waste Industries Association, said the proposal is premature considering the state Department of Environmental Quality taskforce on e-waste has yet to make official recommendations. “I think we’ve got the cart out ahead of the horse here in doing an all-out ban.” Batts also questioned whether lead leaches from electronics in landfills.

Recycling Gridlock

Disposing of old electronics responsibly can be surprisingly difficult and expensive. If a local facility recycles e-waste, it may only take collections once or twice a year, which quickly become overcrowded.

“There’s a huge, huge demand,” said Lori Miller, the city of Lansing’s assistant recycling coordinator. “Every time we have a long line of traffic, but most people don’t wait more than 30 minutes to an hour.”

Miller said shipping and processing costs for e-waste recycling caused Lansing to cut back from two collections a year to one. In 2003, before Lansing began charging fees for recycling e-waste, Miller said just one collection cost $25,000, a significant portion of the department’s total budget. The expense of recycling e-waste is also an issue for the federal government.

Oliver Voss, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency service center manager for information resources and procurement, estimates 10,000 federal computers become obsolete every month. Voss is implementing a federal e-waste recycling program for the EPA. He said managing e-waste is a huge problem that’s getting bigger.

“Practically an avalanche of computers are essentially going into the waste stream because there isn’t a recycling plan in place,” he said. Voss estimates it costs $35 to properly recycle a computer and monitor, and admits it’s a challenge to track what actually happens after e-waste is handed off to a recycler. He said it’s the EPA’s responsibility to audit recyclers to make sure they’re not just shipping e-waste overseas. The EPA is currently negotiating contracts with recyclers to handle a steady stream of federal e-waste.

“We’re hoping that these contractors taking on the federal government’s potential 1.8 million computers — as well as Xerox machines, fax machines, shredders, and anything else electronic — will help increase the supply of recyclers and make it easier,” Voss said. “Hopefully this will decrease the cost, spilling over into private sector where businesses will place their own contracts with these same recyclers.”

E-Waste Economics

Because most states do not regulate e-waste recycling, it is more profitable to ship electronic trash to Asia than spend the time and money to recycle it domestically. The decision to properly dispose of toxic materials is left up to recyclers who may have to forfeit profits to do the right thing. Garett Jones, a sales representative for Great Lakes Electronics Recycling, a Detroit-based business, said his company balances profits with environmental concerns. “We’re not tree huggers, we’re business people — but we’re staying within certain ethical guidelines.”

Jones said Great Lakes Electronics Recycling audits its business partners to verify they don’t send e-waste to landfills. “Our environmental audit of the people that we use has to reveal that they do not [put electronics in a] landfill. If they can’t provide a track of the material, we don’t play.”

Basel Action Network’s Puckett said a long-term solution is to ban e-waste exporting and force the computer industry to take responsibility for producing toxic products.
“You’ve got to shut down the cheap and dirty outlets that externalize very real costs,” he said. “Unfortunately, industry in this country is benefiting from a free escape valve for getting rid of end-of-life products and processed waste. They can just export these problems from the United States.”

Charging a deposit fee on new electronics could help pay for disposal costs. That fee might pay for retailers like Best Buy or Circuit City to receive old computers and ship them to e-waste recyclers. Similar programs already exist for other products such as tires; retailers charge an up-front fee to dispose of old tires when new ones are purchased.

Forcing computer makers and retailers to deal with recycling e-waste might spark more environmentally friendly products. “The electronics manufacturers are one step, two steps, three steps removed — and like to keep it that way — from the realities of the end-of-life of their products,” Puckett said.

“We want to have the economic burden borne by the producers themselves — not taxpayers or governments…they have to feel the brunt of what they’re putting out into society and the environment.”

Better yet would be for manufacturers to build less toxic electronics to begin with. Intel Corporation recently announced plans to drastically reduce lead in its computer chips.
In the meantime, recycling officials are working to educate the public about potential hazards of e-waste. And activists such as Puckett are encouraging people to make sure they’re dealing with ethical recyclers. His organization endorses certain recyclers as e-stewards who pledge in writing to follow sustainable recycling standards.