Who Can Make a Difference in Managing E-Waste? We All Can

Every developed nation in the world holds partial responsibility for the mountain of e-waste that is growing every day. With, for example, 60% of people in the world owning cell phones—only to be replaced in a year or two with the newest model—that mountain is becoming a toxic and increasingly serious problem. Some users of cell phones and other equipment such as televisions, computers, printers and copiers choose to recycle responsibly. But limited services and information are available to guide the average user in repurposing or recycling without harm to the environment. When you replace your laptop, do you know who to call to recycle your old one? Looking larger scale, does your business or workplace have established protocols in place for responsibly retiring your system? If so, what do you know about the organization that handles your e-waste?

Ethical recycling is the lynchpin in addressing the environmental impact of e-waste. Some recyclers in the U.S. repurpose electronics for resale in the domestic or foreign markets, or carefully break down components in their facilities to sell parts or materials. Some recyclers sell retired electronics to waste traders. When they make that choice, your used laptop may be handled legally and conscientiously. But, it could take a trip around the world that ends in lasting damage to people, and the place where they live.

The journey of your old laptop…from front hall closet to Guiyu, China

Say you need to do some spring cleaning. Like most people you know, you have a handful of old electronics that sits in a closet because you do not know what to do with it. You decide, finally, to recycle a laptop you retired last year. You do a little research and call a recycler that advertises its services in your area. You make arrangements to drop it at their facility. Once you have wound up the power cord, set your machine on the counter and paid your fee, what happens next?

If the recycler is ethical, you can feel good about your old laptop’s destination. It will be repurposed or its materials recycled locally in compliance with federal environmental regulations, or even sold to an ethical and legal waste trader. But if not, your laptop may be sold to a trader who makes money by shipping it to a foreign country.

Take Guiyu, China. This little village in the southwestern province of Guangdong has been receiving press recently as a toxic waste dumping ground, and for good reason. There are 5,500 home-based businesses here that process retired electronics from all over the world, either in the open air or in small enclosed sweatshops. In a cargo plane carrying a load of retired electronics, your laptop arrives. It is picked up and brought to a family home where it is pulled apart. Its casing is brought to a stockpile in a neighbor’s yard. Its monitor, to another. Its circuitry, another. Wires, yet another.

Pause and look around this village for a moment. Piles of technology components are everywhere; wires, circuit boards, plastic casings and monitors are in every backyard, on the banks of every stream, along every road. Heaps of wire clog pedestrian streets. Waterways are a murky black from coal ash. Children play near controlled outdoor fires fueled by plastic, men stir smoking barrels in the open air, and women sit in closed rooms in their homes, heating components and melting solder with only a glove and a surgical mask as protection.

Close to 80% of the electronic waste processed here comes from overseas. Guiyu residents accept the work of breaking it down, and the associated conditions, in exchange for a mighty payoff: the village earns $75 million a year for the town as a whole thanks to very loose safety standards in China. Some of the most common work methods include:

• Bashing open cathode ray tubes with hammers, exposing the toxic phosphor dust inside.
• Cooking circuit boards in woks over open fires to melt the lead solder, breathing in toxic lead fumes.
• Burning wires in open piles to melt away the plastics (to get at the copper inside).
• Burning the plastic casings, creating dioxins and furans – some of the most poisonous fumes around.
• Throwing the unwanted (but very hazardous) leaded glass into former irrigation ditches.
• Dumping pure acids and dissolved heavy metals directly into their rivers.

Elevated rates of miscarriage, high lead poisoning rates among children and alarmingly high measures of carcinogenic dioxin have all been documented here, with no end in sight.

Without realizing it, you may have sent your laptop to this place or another, like a small village in Africa, where fires burn near residential areas to break down unusable garbage e-waste. By this point in the process, the laptop that you tried to keep out of a landfill through recycling is lost, contributing to a growing and poisonous problem. But there are better options for the next time you retire a computer, or that cathode-ray television you have wanted to upgrade.

Some recyclers refuse to send out used electronics to waste traders, but instead take full control in recycling used electronics. For example, RenovoData Services in Eden Prairie, Minn., practices on-site breakdown or refurbishment and resale of retired electronics, operating under ISO 14001:2004 certification and providing every customer a Zero Landfill guarantee. In your search for a company that employs these ethical and sustainable practices, the best option is to inquire specifically about them during the initial phone call. If the recycler does not tell you that they work within an environmentally sound structure like that of RenovoData Services, move on to one that does. When you do that, you take a step as a consumer to address the growing problem of e-waste and its environmental and human impacts. If all of us make efforts to be environmentally responsible with our old laptops, peripherals, televisions and of course cell phones, we can avoid adding to the e-waste mountain in years to come.