A little over a week ago, the world rang in the new year one time zone at a time. When it got to the United States, ringing in the new year also brought in new laws, state by state and city by city. USA Today had a headline, “New year brings in hundreds of new laws.” Some of them are as follows. 21 states and five cities raised their minimum wage. Five states increased their taxes on gasoline. In California, dogs are allowed to dine with their human companions in restaurants’ outdoor patios, if the restaurant allows. Illinois imposed a beer tax. Massachusetts will allow “hold open” clips on gas pumps, so customers do not have to hold on to it while pumping gas into their cars. In Oregon, if the home was previously used as a meth lab, sellers must disclose it to the potential buyers. Although, the article didn’t say whether recreation vehicles are included in the law, because they are considered, as per “Breaking Bad,” as “private domicile,” and the occupants shall not be harassed.
In the City of New York, I received an official notice stating, “Starting January 2015, you can’t discard electronics in the trash. Look inside for recycling options.” When I received it in the mail, I thought, “Great! The city’s doing something positive. Let’s see how this great city is going to get this done.
When I opened it, I was extremely disappointed. The notice lists five recycling options.
1) DSNY (Department of Sanitation New York City) allows apartment buildings with more than 10 units to enroll for “free and convenient” pickup service.
2) Retail drop-off programs. Electronics can be dropped off at Goodwill, Salvation Army, Best Buy, Staples (no TVs), or the Gowanus E-Waste Warehouse.
3) Free mail-back programs.
4) Electronics recycling events.
5) Donate or sell working electronics.
Seriously?! This is one very irresponsible law. So the law is to turn everybody in New York City into someone like me, who ends up sitting on a bunch of electronic waste and don’t really know what to do with them. Apartment buildings are asked to voluntarily enroll for pickup service. What if somebody lives in a building with fewer than 10 units? They will have to physically move their electronic waste to a drop off facility. What if the tenant is physically incapable of moving the items to a drop off location?
Missing in the notice is punishment. Electronics cannot be discarded in the trash, but it doesn’t say what will happen if they do. Sure, large items are easy to spot; such as large monitors, computer towers, all-in-one printers, etc. What about the MP3 players, mice, and video game consoles that are listed in the notice? They’re small enough to be thrown out with tonight’s dinner trash. When thinking about it, so what about large items? Who will stop me if I decide to bring a computer tower to the corner and drop it next to a trash can at the intersection in the middle of the night? DSNY does not work that late, although, it is an agency that is allowed to issue summons. Better yet, the New York City Police Department is on a work slowdown, so chances are, I will not get a summons for such a menial offense. What will happen to the computer tower? Will it just sit in the intersection until it rusts itself away?
A responsible law will not only have punishment, but also solutions. For example, normal trash, we’re not allowed to discard it anywhere else in the city, except at designated locations. It is the same with recyclables, such as cans, bottles, and papers products. They are normally convenient, for high-rise apartment buildings, there are garbage chutes. The garbage gets compressed and left at the curb for collection. For houses, residents haul the garbage out to the curb in front of their home. It should be the same for electronic waste. Disposing of it should be simple, not the same inconveniences as before the law. The law doesn’t really change anything. Even with convenient collection of non-recyclables and recyclables, some people still don’t do it, what made the lawmakers think that having a law in place will make people do more work?
I’m quite disappointed. Maybe on the bright side, at least it’s a step in the right direction, albeit, a very small step, more like a twitch.
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.
Some things are easy, such as paper products, beverage cans and bottles. Those receptacles are all over the place. It should be a crime for somebody to throw a bottle into a trash bin that goes to the landfills. Even if there isn’t one in the immediate vicinity, it can be brought home. Towns in the USA provide recycling bins to residences with street pick up. Apartment buildings tend to have them as well, either in the compactor room, staircase, or basement. It’s not that hard to do your part to put the right contents into the right bin.
E-waste, however, is quite difficult. There are no regular pick ups. When I went to school at the University at Buffalo, there were bins in the libraries for floppy discs and CDs. At the University at Buffalo, I used to roam the halls of the different buildings on campus. From time to time, I saw used computers and monitors left outside in the hallways for collection. I also went to Baruch College, there were collection points for used cell phones. That’s e-waste disposal in schools that I’ve seen.
To recycle e-waste, a person must do some work. Where does one go? One obvious place will be the large electronics retailers, such as Best Buy, Staples, and Dell. Best Buy, there’s a recycling link at the bottom of the homepage in under Product Support. Click on it, and it explains why Best Buy recycles and why it’s important. There are some exceptions to what it will accept in their stores, “Recycling is intended for residents only. Products from businesses and organizations are not accepted. Items that present a health or safety hazard are not accepted.” For business e-waste, one needs to go through an outside company, MRM.
A quick look with Staples, I didn’t see a recycling link, so I moved on. With Dell, I had to click through Corporate Responsibility at the bottom of the homepage in the Company category. Then I have to click on Environment, where it talks about how Dell is trying to help. It has a wide range of services for recycling for businesses, private individuals, toner recycling, and others.
Most of these services are free and safe. Dell ensures that business data gets destroyed and not be released into the world. However, it’s a lot of work. It’s not easy clicking through through all these links and read so many words. First, these links need to be seek out, they’re not at the top of the site. After all that, one has to decide on whether to pack up the car and bring it to a participating Goodwill location or call in and make an arrangement for pick up. Ever tried to move an all-in-one printer? They’re quite heavy! It’s much easier to throw them into the Dumpster. What if I live in a city and doesn’t have a car? I don’t want to drag pounds of e-waste for several blocks, into the subway, or onto a bus. Worth it to flag a taxi? Rent a van?
Worst of all, they’re not advertised! A person like me will have to consciously go through all the steps of searching and do what’s necessary. I ran a search once and drove my e-waste to a collection facility in my county in New Jersey. In my trunk, I had two used printers, one 19-inch CRT monitor, three used towers, and other peripherals. It was heavy load, the drive was a short 20 minutes away. Someone else who does not know or does not care will not think twice about sending their e-waste to the landfills.
Unlike a person with a plastic bottle in hand and faced with a bin with three deposit options. Even if a person who doesn’t care about recycling, it doesn’t take much to move the hand a few inches to drop the bottle into the right hole. E-waste requires work to hand over to the correct party. There’s just no real incentive in doing it, aside for self-satisfaction of doing something right.
I’ve worked in a few places over the years. In some of those places, I get to change the toner cartridge of the laser printer(s). Sometimes, there’s a UPS label in the box of the new cartridge. When I see one, I’ll pack the old cartridge into the box, tape it up, and affix the UPS label to the outside of the box and wait for UPS to pick it up. When I do that, my colleagues asked why I do it and if I get money for it. I tell them that I don’t receive monetary compensation, it’s just the right thing to do. They don’t get it, they rather just throw the cartridge into the trash. I don’t understand why they would rather throw the cartridges away than to send it the delivery address on the UPS label. My previous employers have warehouses, where tape is readily available, and has daily UPS pick up. A couple of those places have so much UPS packages going out, they’re loaded onto the UPS trucks on pallets with a forklift. It was not hard to throw one of these old cartridges onto the outgoing pallet.
I think there are two things that are preventing the masses from doing their part in e-waste recycling. One is education. Most don’t know how bad e-waste is to the environment, creating a sense of non-caring. With paper, the majority feels bad about killing all those trees to make the paper that we use. Wasting paper is not good. Cans and bottles, in some states, there are monetary incentives, so even if people throw them into regular trash receptacles, there will be collectors going through the trash to retrieve them for recycling. In New York City, it is a common sight, people digging in the trash to pick out the cans and bottles for their 5-cent value. For some, that’s their main source of income. Recycling cans and bottles are also hammered into people’s brains, it became automatic for some.
Second is regulation. There are laws against e-waste being in landfills, however, they are not enforced. If a computer tower goes into a Dumpster, then buried under a bunch of trash, to be loaded into a garbage truck and compressed, it goes to the landfill with everything else. There’s no legal consequences, no fines issued.
How do we get others to do the right thing? How do we stop the growth of e-waste?
How big of a problem is electronic waste?: http://youtu.be/UyIpG7UJKyI
In electronic waste recycling, there’s a lot of talk in extracting the metal. Metals important, they’re worth a lot of money and are easily transformed into other things. Recycling metal is also more energy efficient than refining from ore straight out of the ground. One of the previously posted videos, it mentioned that gold extracted from circuit boards can be used for gold dental fillings. In a video on Guiyu, plastic casings from monitors were burned and thrown into irrigation canals. That got me wondering about plastic, “Is plastic that hard to recycle, especially computer monitor plastic?”
To find out why, my first step was to reach out to my cousin living in Hong Kong. Her husband’s family owns a plastic recycling plant in China that turns scrap plastic into little pellets, much like what was shown in another previously posted video, the Reading Rainbow one. The company imports hundreds, if not thousands of containers of plastic from the USA and other parts of the world of scrap plastic for the plant. Her response was so shocking, there’s not no reason to continue with the research. She wrote, “Monitor and PC plastics are not hard to recycle, plastics from these items are our main plastics recycle stream.”
Let’s repeat, “Monitor and PC plastics are not hard to recycle, plastics from these items are our main plastics recycle stream.”
Guiyu is 200 miles northeast of Hong Kong. Therefore, tons of plastic are burned and discarded in a distance similar to New York City and Boston. That blew my mind! There are companies importing scrap plastic legally, from all over the world into China. Yet, there are tons of these types of plastic smuggled into China. This means that if these plastic recycling plants can get their hands on these smuggled plastics, it can potentially save them a lot of money. It can’t be that expensive to send a truck over and collect all the plastics that were marked for burning for recycling. That should be much more cheaper than buying the plastic, shipping it, and pay duties and taxes on them.
My cousin also said that the plastic must be treated first. Scrap plastics bought in the USA and other well established recycling program countries are already treated. If that’s the case, why not build the plant in China to process the plastic? The plastic recycling factories are close to Hong Kong, consumer product factories are in the same area, the source of plastic is a little further away. Logistically, it is perfect. The cost of processing the plastic to be recycled is already built into the price that these plastic recycling companies are paying for already. Besides, I believe that the cost of building and running a processing plant should be cheaper in China than in the USA.
I don’t think there should be any reason why plastic should be all over the place, such as the ocean, landfills, and discarded here and there. There is no question that we use a lot of plastic. Not one day goes by that plastic does not somehow be part of my life; the computer keyboards that I type on, the structure of the seats on the commuter rail, the pen I write with, the takeout container that I bought food in, etc. Tons and tons of plastics are discarded in the modern world. Almost everything in a trashcan can be recycled. Yet, collectively, we still feel that it is much easier to send our trash to the landfill than to get them turned into new things. What are we missing?
Another amazing thing is that most people don’t see how interconnected things are. We buy electronics made in China. When we discard them, those that get recycled, the plastic goes back to China. Then products come over from China to be purchased by us again. Except the ones that end up getting burned, they’re not really coming back. However, there are reports that Guiyu is being cleaned up, the electronic wastes are being moved into a newly built industrial park for recycling. Maybe they will come back as some consumer product for us to buy, possibly cheaper.
It can work, we have the technology in place, we just need the infrastructure. Electronic waste doesn’t have to be an environmental issue. Most waste don’t have to be as well. Are we willing to solve it?
Not a video this time, but a fun interactive on how T-shirts are made. Similar to plastic, American cotton travels to China to be turned into T-shirts for us to buy in the stores here.
It’s understandable that some people will continue to do what they do. They’re just set in how they do things and some of them don’t understand why there’s a need to change. My father is the same age as the People’s Republic of China, and from the same place. He doesn’t know why we need to recycle. I don’t think he even understands the word at all. It’s a gigantic bafflement to him whenever my mother gives him a hard time when she’s digging through the trash recovering the bottles and cans that were thrown in by him. Occasionally, she’ll find a battery, a little Duracell AAA copper top. That’s when he’ll really get it from her. Even after so many years, he doesn’t understand. As far as he knows, a soda bottle can help a poor soul obtain five cents if that person can get it to those bottle crushing machines. That’s it! A drained battery that does not have enough power from him to turn the TV on does not fetch any money at all. Why shouldn’t it belong in the trash?
Same with electronics. If it stops working, it should go where trash goes, to wherever that’s not here. A lot of people, like my father, has no interests in learning and doing what needs to be done. My mother is ten years younger, from Hong Kong, and receptive of its public announcements. In Hong Kong, during commercial breaks, in place of commercials for a soft drink or cosmetics, it informs on how people can work together for the betterment of the community. Topics on helping elderly people cross the street or up the stairs, use a tissue to pick up a discarded potato chip bag on the street and deposit it in a trash receptacle, and of course, make sure recyclables are separated from non-recyclables and what are and what aren’t.
In a different view, one can say that those messages are propaganda for brainwashing. Sure it is! Just like Nazi and Communist propaganda on why their party is so great and everybody else is evil. Or getting American kids to eat Cocoa Puffs over Cinnamon Toast Crunch or to choose an Audi over a Mercedes-Benz. We call that marketing in the USA. A topic that maybe we should revisit some other time.
Education! A form of brainwashing, or brain molding. Education is key to help us save the environment that we need to live in. I’ve been strongly influenced by “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton on the human philosophy of technology. One of the characters, Dr. Ian Malcolm essentially said that there’s no sense in “saving the planet.” Earth has been around for billions of years, long before humans came along. If we manage to kill ourselves off, something in the toxic soil will begin to grow and life will begin again after all humans are gone. I’m paraphrasing, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Earth doesn’t care what happens to us, we need to care about what happens to us. We created the technology, it is up to us to control ourselves to make sure that our creation will not destroy us. There are plenty of movies out there on how our brought the apocalypse onto ourselves.
The best way to slow down, stop, and even reverse course is to provide the information to children as young as possible. It’s sad that education is normally the first budge to get cut and public school teachers get paid so little. Politicians don’t care about individuals from the high school level down, none of them can vote. We need to teach our kids what needs to be done to save our environment. I learned about recycling paper, bottles, and cans from elementary school in the mid ’80s. There are more of me who are willing to do the bare minimum than those who are 10 years older than me. There will be more who are 10 years younger than me willing to do the same. A lot of environmental programs come out of universities. The 5-cent deposit in New York State was spearheaded by college students, an incentive to turn in cans and bottles.
Kids should not be educated for the sake of education. Each an every individual American student needs to be prepared to compete with students from abroad. Not only in school, but in their professional lives as well. In order for the United States to remain strong, we need to make sure that we will have the leaders to keep us there. Those leaders are the ones playing on the playgrounds of our schools. They need to be prepared to take on the oncoming tasks. Most importantly, it is our environment. Political situations change, economic woes are unpredictable, old enemies get defeated and new enemies emerge. The only things that are under constant threat is our quality of air, water, and land. We need to correct the wrongs, because there’s nobody else that will do it.
Guiyu, China. If you type this place into Google, it is identified as the dumping ground for electronics waste, about 200 miles northeast of Hong Kong. A CNN article published on May 30, 2013, titled “China: The electronic wastebasket of the world, with the location as this place.” It says, “According to a recent United Nations report, ‘China now appears to be the largest e-waste dumping site in the world.'” This is where our used electronics go. “‘According to United Nations data, about 70% of electronic waste globally generated ended up in China,’ said Ma Tianjie, a spokesman for the Beijing office of Greenpeace.”
I once went to the Bergen County Utilities Authority to drop off some electronics, two computer towers, two printers, a VCR, etc. When I got there, I pulled up to the security shed and told the security guard why I was there. He searched my car, examined the electronics, and called for an escort. It was a huge sprawling compound with green grass in between the buildings. If not for the industrial looking buildings, it could’ve been a golf course. After a few twists and turns, we arrived to a 20-foot container sitting on the ground. The doors were opened, the escort asked me to put my electronics into it. I complied, emptied my trunk of them and added the items to those already inside. Driving past the gate on my way home, I wondered if what I just placed into that container will end up in China.
Some people pay companies to pick up their used electronics for recycling. Others pay electronics stores to accept them in their stores. Then there are the drives in towns with cars lining up for miles to drop off the electronics that they no longer want. Some, like me, drove to the county facility and loaded the items into the container myself. Of course, there are companies such as Best Buy who accepts them for free, you just have to bring it to them. All the work that we put in, there’s still a chance that they end up in China. Similar to mechanics charging for tire disposal fees and the tires end up at a bottom of the ocean or the Chinese restaurant emptying the box full of empty bottles and cans into a black garbage bag and leave it out with the rest of the trash for the nightly Sanitation pick up.
If you have seen videos of a previous post of how facilities extract gold, silver, and other metals from circuit boards, that’s not how they do it in Guiyu. They do it like how I saw them in Zhongshan from a distance, they stick the boards into an open flame to melt the metals. At that heat, everything on that board either burns up or get melted too. As per the UN report on E-Waste in China in 2013, “Much of the toxic pollution comes from burning circuit boards, plastic and copper wires, or washing them with hydrochloric acid to recover valuable metals like copper and steel. In doing so, workshops contaminate workers and the environment with toxic heavy metals like lead, beryllium and cadmium, while also releasing hydrocarbon ashes into the air, water and soil, the report said.”
There was a 60 Minutes segment on this topic. People are getting sick from this line of work and dying. Workers continue to migrate into this area to perform these dangerous and unhealthy tasks because it’s a choice between poverty and food on the table. Most chose to support themselves as well as their families. Unlike factories in China with oversight from American or other foreign companies, workers have no protection. There’s no set hours of work and pay. Nobody comes in to make sure that the work environment is safe with clearly marked danger zones or warnings in Chinese. Since there’s no regulations, there’s nothing preventing children from working as well. Yes, child labor in this area is commonplace. When 60 Minutes got into the town, within minutes, they were spotted and escorted by the local police to the City Hall. Then the mayor personally gave the crew a tour of the dismantling workshops. They were clean, works had some protection, and things were more systematic. After the tour, they were ushered out of the town. Once outside, the crew switched cars and returned, to where the people live and work in the electronics waste muck. There, they encountered confrontational gang members and nearly lost some samples and a camera.
What is happening in Guiyu is an open secret. People know it exists, China denies its existence. Proof is that China has been very quiet about it. The easiest way to get e-waste to Guiyu is through Hong Kong. From the United States, FCL (Full Container Load) rates are cheap. It is a free port, so no duties or taxes required. Transportation companies in Hong Kong know how to move things across the border with minimal Chinese customs interference, goods that include cosmetics, baby formula, batteries, American beef, and electronic waste. From time to time, e-waste gets discovered by Hong Kong customs and the container gets returned to the USA. No legal charges filed on the Hong Kong side. 60 Minutes followed one such container from a recycling company from Colorado to Hong Kong and back, because it was rejected. An investigation was launched by Customs, EPA, and other federal agencies against this company thereafter. I don’t believe that 60 Minutes happened to catch the first container of this company that has ever been refused in Hong Kong. There should be others. Not until it was broadcasted on national television that these agencies did something about it.
China never complained to the United States about this issue. When asked by the world to be environmentally responsible, it responds to be a developing country and should be exempt from the requirements taken on by developed nations. Yet, this illegal issue has never been brought up in summits. Chinese media outlets did not talk about the leaders who allowed this kind of toxic generating activities to thrive being punished. It talked about the baby formula scandal which killed and permanently deformed many babies, the under table deals with their national high speed railroad, and corruption at the highest levels of the Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army. Individuals were put on trial and some executed. Most recently, about 300 Chinese customs agents were dismissed and replaced at the border crossings around Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a town on the China-Hong Kong border founded primarily to facilitate international trade that goes into China through Hong Kong in 1979. “Recent” means the last couple of weeks of this blog entry. The company I work for has customers’ shipments held up, among thousands of trucks trying to cross the border into Hong Kong, because the new agents are combing over everything. Contraband such as drugs are being discovered. Yet, no mention of electronic waste going into China. People are saying, “Give it a few months, then it’ll be like before.” Maybe it’ll revert, maybe not, time will tell.
Don’t for a second think the USA is any better. It’s better in a sense that Customs agents are rarely corrupt in this country. The problem is that goods can easily leave the country. For those who has ever traveled overseas, how many Customs agents, formally called Customs and Border Protection Officers, do you encounter from the security checkpoint to your seat on the plane? Seeing them at the food court in the terminal does not count, they’re off duty or on break. Security checkpoints are manned by TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agents. TSA have no arresting power or allowed to carry firearms as Customs agents. You most likely didn’t see any. Cargo is pretty much the same. They’re more interested in what’s coming in than what’s going out. Going out, they’re more interested in intercepting cash.
In a PC Advisor (UK) article, published on Sep. 5, 2014, it says the situation in Guiyu is being cleaned up. An industrial park opened up north of it and some operations have been moved into it, where electronic waste can be processed in a more modern way. “Residents said it’s rare now to see ‘board burning’ in the town itself.” There are rice patties nearby where farmers say the water is safe. Locals say things have gotten better than five years ago. It is a good thing that something is being done about this, but we must still be vigilant and watchful of the development. How does a place such a s Guiyu, with all of its problems, clean up in a span of about a year?
First and foremost, water and food, how is it possible that the water is clean already? How do we know the rice that is grown in the area does not end up in the American food supply? Then the “modern” facilities themselves, are they up to international standards? If China is cleaning up Guiyu, what about the less notorious towns that’s doing the same thing across China? 70% of the world’s electronic waste comes to this country as per the U.N. Never forget Africa, where electronic waste are dumped there as well. At least China has a more effective government, most African nations do not have that luxury.
As human beings and Americans, we should be responsible with our own actions. Such as how we try to spread democracy and watchful of human rights violations, we should not impose our problems on others. Isn’t access to clean water, air, and food a basic human right?
To prevent our trash from spreading across the world, we must first start at home. We need to educate the next generation and reflect upon ourselves. This problem largely stem from consumerism. With behavior and law changes, we can together make the world a better place.
Here is a video from the Basel Action Network (BAN). It’s a little long, about 25 minutes, but it is extremely interesting.
We throw out so many electronics in the USA that there is just not enough capacity to process them all. Therefore, some companies do what humans do; dispose the trash somewhere else and let another party take care of it. Something most of us do multiple times every day, such as flushing the toilet, throwing garbage down the chute for building dwellers and leaving bagged trash on the curb for house habitats. Others might just throw trash out of their car window, leave coffee cups on trains, flick wrappers over their shoulders on the street, etc. Same thing with e-waste.
Why should we care? Why do I care?
Who ever felt good after stepping into a pile of dog poop? Or fall asleep only to wake up to shoes drenched in coffee because someone left half a cup of it under the seat of your commuter train that spilled? Or have to evacuate from your house because somebody decided that it was not their own problem by flicking a cigarette butt out of their car window during dry conditions and a raging forest fire is barreling toward your home like a freight train at full speed? How would you like to wake up, walk to your front porch, and take in a mountain of electronic waste across the street as you breathe in acrid air, simply because some other country couldn’t process such volume? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
My first view of electronic waste recycling facilities in China was on a clear summer night in the rural areas near Zhongshan. My brother and I were outside with our cousin, who was having an after dinner cigarette. The sun was setting, the bats were flying overhead, and fields as far as the eyes can see in the fading light. Something else was in the horizon, columns of black smoke rose from the fields seemingly at every few feet. Overcame with curiosity, I asked my cousin what was being burned out there. He said the people are burning circuit boards. Shocked, I followed up with asking why people will do such things, because circuit boards releases toxins when burned, especially the computer chips. The response was gold retrieval. Then I asked if there is an equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in China. He said that there is, but they’re off in the evening. Nonchalantly, he continued to enjoy his cigarette, he was a local police officer at the time.
The next encounter with such recycling methods was in the United States, the journey’s origin. I work in the freight forwarding industry for many years now. At one of the previous places of my employment, early in my career, two 40-foot containers backed into our dock. One was empty, the other was full of computer peripherals with an occasional CRT monitor or computer tower. Four Chinese workers were hired to move all the contents from the full container to the empty container. These were not my co-workers, they were hired by someone who wanted to do the transfer and used our dock to do it. The container was so full, when the doors were pulled open, the contents spilled out onto the warehouse floor as depicted in cartoons of overstuffed closets. We were never told why this occurred or where the containers came from or going to.
Then I came to find out that electronic wastes were sent to China illegally. Not only China, but Africa as well. When I first learned of the burning, I thought the people were burning local e-waste. The closest town had a sizable computer and electronics mall. The brother of the smoking cousin owns a small computer store and does repairs, with a questionable business model. People there were chasing technology in China as Americans, always looking for faster processors, better graphics, larger hard drive space, etc. When I saw the container of computer peripherals, I thought they were to be refurbished and sold, by people such as my not-so-honest cousin of a computer repairman. However, that was not the case, American electronic wastes are being smuggled out of the United States illegally and dumped into other countries illegally.
This practice poses serious questions. Right at the top of the list is national security. It is easy to smuggle electronic waste or other commodities out of the country. Instead of containers of our junk, they could easily have been weapons, rockets, and other items that can be used to hurt American service members and civilians, as well as other people. In the news on ISIS, they are driving Humvees! American-made Humvees that not too long ago, the news were showing U.S. soldiers and Marines driving them around. Never mind weapons, even containers of Humvee parts can be devastating to the global efforts of stopping and defeating ISIS.
Other issues that we have are environmental, the methods being used to extract precious metal from circuit boards pollute the air, ground, and water. They might seem local, but pollutants in the air can travel great distances. The world’s water supply is connected. Where are most household goods made? They are made in China, the factories might not be that far away from these dumping grounds.
To have a good understanding of what’s happening, we will need to go to China.
Here’s a WWF video depicting that we’re all connected.
Like most beginnings of a journey, it starts at the home. The homes of electronics, whether in an actual family home or a corporate office, that is where they lived, where they were useful. Eventually, their usefulness will run out, then discarded. In corporate settings, there is always a strive for better equipment. It is not always something management wants to do, because it costs money, lowers profit. These decisions often come about when the employees complain too much. Then coupled with the fact that productivity is indeed going down due to the lag in technology upgrade. Old equipments must be replaced. When I first started to work in the industry I’m working in now, freight forwarding, the company used dial up for e-mail. Whenever someone needed to check e-mail, the person will call out to see if anybody’s on. If it was in use, the person will have to wait. This was back in 2002. Eventually, more vendors and customers used e-mail. Requests were made to stop sending faxes, and some of those faxes were 10 to 20 pages long. With much complaints and requests, the owner reluctantly had a T1 line installed, bought printers with scanning functions, and upgraded some of the computers without ethernet cards. As technology continued to move ahead, we needed new versions of Windows and Office, needed more memory to run these new versions, needed more hard drive space to hold these new versions, etc. etc. This led to new computers. To our joy, we received new computers at last! Good riddance to the old ones! Same with schools, colleges and universities, they are all buying new computers and throwing old ones out about every two to three years. Schools, like businesses, need to attract more students, customers. It will be extremely poor marketing to show their computer labs using the previous version of Windows or have the “graphics” section lined with the previous generation of MacPros. That’s repulsive to prospective students. On their brochures, they must boast on having the latest technology conducive of fostering academic excellence. This is also one of the reasons why the cost of attending college is getting more and more expensive. Then let’s not forget our own homes. We replace our own computers too. Then there’s also the television from the big bulky one to the flat screened one to the HD one, to the 4K one and beyond. The VCR got replaced by the DVD player. After the kitchen got remodeled, the refrigerator does not quite fit in, stainless steel is the hype now. Also, let’s replace the washer and dryer for more energy efficient ones, to be more “green.” We also have our pockets to consider. How many remember the beeper? I guess with the beeper, it was more on the belt than in the pocket. After the beeper, the cell phone came about. Since the first cell phone, how many phones have you had since? I can’t even remember how many, but my first cell phone was a Nokia in 2001. From here, we send them off. Let us see how a tablet can replace your laptop: http://youtu.be/CTo5DfBtWkY
tklliang 