Recycle Week: E-waste, Part 1: The problem

This week's eco-topic: Recycle

Chances are, you have a few old electronics you no longer use hanging out in your storage space. Maybe it's nostalgia for bygone tech, maybe it's a hope that the broken DVD player will somehow fix itself, or maybe it's that you sense throwing a hunk of metal and chemicals into the black bin can't be a good idea -- but don't quite know what else to do with the old electronics.

Many of our neighbors don't seem to have a problem sending their computers to the landfill, where they'll leach toxins into our atmosphere. While throwing e-waste into the black bin's illegal in California, that law isn't very well enforced, as you can imagine. A recent AP article reports that "most of the 2 million tons of old electronics discarded annually by Americans goes to U.S. landfills, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data."

But the problem doesn't stop there. Even some self-described e-waste recyclers aren't concerned about proper recycling, as the AP article points out. Some shady companies will collect e-waste from well-meaning people who bring them to e-waste drives, then these companies will "simply sell the working units and components, then give or sell the remaining scrap to export brokers."

Those dangerous scraps then end up in countries such as China, India and Nigeria, where workers "use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals."

The problem's become so vast that nonprofits have sprung up to combat the toxic trade created by e-waste. Basel Action Network, an organization that's focused on "confronting the global environmental injustice and economic inefficiency of toxic trade and its devastating impacts," put together a video that shows one place where toxic e-waste ends up:

Next post: How to recycle your electronics, simply, without becoming part of the e-waste problem.

Top photo by David J via Flickr; bottom photo courtesy of Basel Action Network 2006

Comments

[Roberta Brodsky]

Hi,

I'd love to hear about who you can find in California that actually recycles the final end-parts of the items that cannot be resold or refurbished. I have not found any e-waste recycler in California who doesn't export.