Disconnect in a Connected World

Very often politicians have lost touch with how an average person lives.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s city, state, or local, even businesses and other institutions have this problem.  Those running things, the President of the United States, lawmakers, politicians, business executives, owners of companies, president of universities, etc. etc.  At some point, they become disconnected.  Has it ever occurred to you to ask, “What were they thinking?!”

Laws are sometimes preemptive and other times reactionary.  One example that touched the largest number of individuals of reactionary is the USA PATRIOT Act that was passed after the events of September 11, 2001.  There’s been a lot of controversy and debate behind this act, from national security to personal privacy.

Electronic waste is an issue and politicians saw that.  After advocacy groups provided their studies on the toxicity of these items decomposing in the landfills, local citizens voiced their concerns.  As a result, laws were enacted to ban such wastes from landfills.  This is not national, but differs from state to state, even city to city.  One thing that all these places with these laws in place have in common, there is no enforcement.

We can test this out, find out if your place of residence has such laws in place.  Then put out your electronic waste with the regular trash.  See what happens.  Chances are, you will not be fined.  Best case scenario, the garbage man will recognize that it’s electronic waste and will not throw it into the truck, if it’s curbside pick up.  Worst case scenario, it disappears from your curb and you’ll never see it again.  If you’re in a commercial building with Dumpsters chained in the parking lot, put a computer tower into it.  It’ll probably be loaded into the garbage truck and compressed with everything else in it.  Nobody will hear anything else from it, no fines, no warnings, simply nothing.  The electronic waste will get dropped off at the landfill and will contribute to ruining the environment as if the laws were never enacted.  At least I’ve never heard anybody getting penalized.  If you have, please share the story.

I worked in a company that used to import food products for a company.  That importing company went out of business and all those items needed to be disposed of, mainly because they’ve sat around for so long, everything expired.  To get rid of them, a waste disposal company was called upon and a large Dumpster was dropped off, right up to the loading dock.  All the expired food went into it, as well as broken skids that were lying around the warehouse, and other items that were normally too large for our normal trash collection Dumpster.  Then I heard one manager speak to another, “Can you believe that we have three hoovers in there?” The managers brought some of their household trash in to throw out, and yes, one of them was British.  Hoovers is how they refer to vacuum cleaners.  They threw in electronic trash!  What was the consequence of that?  Nothing!  When the man came to pick up the Dumpster, he did the company a favor.  It rained for the last two days, so there was water in it.  He drained it before hauling it away, so our company didn’t have to pay for the water weight.  The place just reeked of garbage for a week and that was the end of it.

Another issue that came out of these banning laws is that it overloads the small number of electronic waste recyclers.  With capacity issues, some have no choice but to export them overseas.  If done properly and legally, and the destination will process the electronic waste properly, that’s fine.  However, there are those who smuggle them out of the USA to be smuggled into places such as China, and they go to towns such a Guiyu.  There, workers, including kids, dismantle the electronic items to extract whatever value they could using the most primitive, dangerous, and environmentally damaging ways.

What can we do where the government failed?