Ghana, an E-Waste Graveyard

When you toss that old busted stereo or out-of-date analog television into the trash heap, where does it ultimately end up? Most likely in a poor community in a far-away country like Ghana, where electronic waste arrives on barges and sits in gigantic piles, contaminating the soil and water with toxic chemicals.

PBS Frontline investigated the e-waste disposal situation in Ghana, which has gotten so bad that some locals call the area “Sodom and Gomorrah”.

And, human health and the environment aren’t the only concerns that spring from this practice. It’s beginning to affect the very people who throw their electronics away in the first place, in the form of identity theft. Salvageable hard drives are sold on the street, many of which still contain personal information.

Watch:

Earth 911 reports that the U.S. is finally beginning to recognize how big a problem e-waste dumping really is – there currently aren’t any laws that prohibit dumping overseas, but a proposed bill would ban exports of certain types of electronics materials meant for recycling. The bill isn’t perfect, though – critics say it contains loopholes that make continued dumping inevitable.

Clearly, something needs to be done fast. We can’t continue to look the other way knowing that all of this waste is affecting poor communities all over the world.

Link [Earth 911]
Photo credit: Greenpeace

Mr. Trash Can Is Overworked!

While carbon emissions may be the current cause of the environmental movement, let’s not forget the more tangible waste products we are unleashing upon the earth. Annually, households and businesses throw out 251 million tons of trash. And while, not shockingly, the major offenders are industries such as mining, everyday American consumers are responsible for five pounds of trash a day.

Check out this cute animated video from GOOD about an over-worked American trash can. It serves as inspiration to reduce our own output of trash as well as industrial waste.

The Digital Conversion Will Send Thousands of Useless TVs to Landfills

As the February 17th deadline for the digital TV conversion looms, more people are starting to wonder what can be done with all of the televisions that will become obsolete. State and local governments have been concerned about old TVs piling up in landfills since the switch was first announced, and some have developed special recycling programs to handle the problem.

Some states are charging for the privilege to recycle your old TV, however, making it an unpopular option – and many are seeing increases in illegal TV dumping. It’s illegal in 11 states to dispose of televisions in landfills due to hazardous substances contained within them as well as their heavy weight.

The government is offering coupons worth $40 toward the cost of a DTV conversion box that will keep old analog televisions working after the switch, but they’re starting to run out. There are also some reported problems with the conversion boxes, since various broadcasters present programs in different aspect ratios and some programs appear double-letterboxed, cropped into a 13” picture on a 17” television. All of this makes it likely that many people will choose to upgrade their televisions rather than use the conversion box.

Chicago’s The Week Behind explains the problem:

Bart Forbes, a spokesman for the U.S. Commerce Department, admits the DTV conversion kit is a stopgap measure, and he points out the coupons are not a magic bullet. The coupons were aimed at preventing poor, rural and older citizens from losing their TV signals entirely. They were not intended to let viewers replicate the HDTV experience.

As it stands now, only 18% of discarded TVs ever reach a recycler. The vast majority of these (about 80%) wind up being shipped overseas to Asia, South America and other developing countries for resale or materials recovery.

Inside the United States, the EPA estimates only two percent (that’s less than 100,000 TVs) are broken down in “glass to glass” recycling plants while another 16 percent go to smelters for lead recovery or recycling companies that cull out the plastic and metal parts.

Since we’ve learned that we can’t necessarily rely on recycling programs to actually dispose of electronic waste safely and ethically, many people with analog televisions are unsure of what to do.

You can find out what your state’s laws are and whether recycling programs are available locally at MyGreenElectronics.com, a site run by the environmental affairs division of the Consumer Electronics Association. If you can’t find recycling options, hang on to your television until new laws and government oversight ensure that it can be safely recycled.

Link [The Week Behind]
Photo credit: Flickr user luisvilla

The World’s First Carbon Neutral Cell Phone

Motorola has unveiled the world’s first carbon neutral cell phone, the Renew W233. Tackling the massive problem of e-waste, Motorola designed the Renew W233 to be the first certified Carbonfree cell phone on the market with 100% recyclable housing made from recycled water bottles.

Inhabitat reports that an astounding 426,000 cell phones are retired every single day in the United States, with most of them ending up in landfills. That is definitely a mind-boggling amount of waste, and as we’ve seen, e-waste isn’t pretty and is killing thousands of poor residents in developing countries where the waste is dumped.

From Inhabitat:

Motorola’s Renew W233 cellphone features an admirable set of sustainable features that directly address the phone’s carbon footprint and life cycle. By partnering up with Carbonfund.org Motorola offsets the energy to manufacture, distribute, and operate the phone by investing in renewable energy sources and reforestation. Once the phone reaches the end of its life cycle it can be easily recycled by placing it in a prepaid envelope that is provided in the box. Additionally, the phone’s packaging consumes 22% less material and the manual is printed on post consumer recycled paper with soy-based inks.

It’s about time that companies begin thinking about where their products will end up once their conventional usage is completed. After all, how can we as consumers be responsible for properly disposing of such items?

It’s nice that this phone has a recyclable housing, and it’s a commendable step forward for Motorola, but we’ve got to start demanding that manufacturers take responsibility for ALL parts of their products. Otherwise we’ll never stop the mountains of toxic e-waste from accumulating.

Link [Inhabitat]

China’s Dirty Secret: 60 Minutes Follows America’s Electronic Waste

The gangs who run the electronic wasteland in China don’t want you to see it. In fact, they’re so keen on keeping it out of the media that they attacked a 60 Minutes crew that was attempting to document the frightening, toxic mess full of lead, cadmium, chromium, polyvinyl chloride and other dangerous substances. But, 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley got the scoop anyway, exposing what happens when our electronics are illegally shipped overseas for dumping.

From CBS News:

It’s worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling – about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.

At a recycling event in Denver, 60 Minutes found cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks, in a line that lasted for hours. They were there to drop off their computers, PDAs, TVs and other electronic waste.

Asked what he thought happens once his e-waste goes into recycling, one man told Pelley, “Well my assumption is they break it apart and take all the heavy metals and out and then try to recycle some of the stuff that’s bad.”

Most folks in line were hoping to do the right thing, expecting that their waste would be recycled in state-of-the-art facilities that exist here in America. But really, there’s no way for them to know where all of this is going. The recycling industry is exploding and, as it turns out, some so-called recyclers are shipping the waste overseas, where it’s broken down for the precious metals inside.

60 Minutes followed the container of e-waste that was collected in Denver for 7,459 miles to Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong. It turned out that the carton of e-waste that would supposedly be ‘recycled’ was just one of thousands on an illegal smuggling route, to be dumped in poor communities. The town of Guiyu was described by 60 Minutes as ‘a sort of Chernobyl of electronic waste’.

Greenpeace has been filming around Guiyu and caught the recycling work. Women were heating circuit boards over a coal fire, pulling out chips and pouring off the lead solder. Men were using what is literally a medieval acid recipe to extract gold. Pollution has ruined the town. Drinking water is trucked in. Scientists have studied the area and discovered that Guiyu has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. They found pregnancies are six times more likely to end in miscarriage, and that seven out of ten kids have too much lead in their blood.

The whole article over at the 60 Minutes website is definitely worth a read. It’s a sobering reality check for anyone who thought that recycling drives are the answer to our massive electronic waste problem. Both consumers and manufacturers have got to take responsibility for where these products end up when they’ve outlived their usefulness to us.

Watch a video of the attack on the 60 Minutes crew at The Huffington Post.

Link [60 Minutes]