Recycling of electronics encouraged
Hey, you with the old cell phone in the utility drawer!
You with the obsolete computers and TVs gathering dust in the attic!
If you’re like a lot of folks, you’re wondering: How the heck am I supposed to get rid of this stuff, without it leaching toxic chemicals in a landfill or fouling the Third World?
Seattle already has banned tossing computer monitors, televisions and mobile phones in the trash. King County is following with a ban effective Oct. 1 that also includes computers.
This electronic waste — “e-waste” in the vernacular of the budding electronics-recycling industry — is a growing problem. Consider just the computers — hundreds of millions of which are headed for the scrap pile in the next five years alone.
For years, lawmakers and others around the country have been searching for ways to encourage recycling of mountains of hazardous e-waste. The issue came up last week at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Seattle. In Olympia next year, Washington legislators are also expected to begin exploring possible solutions. The short answer to your dilemma with your old computer or VCR is pretty simple, though: You pay a premium to get that stuff recycled.
“I work in the computer industry, so I know how dirty the industry can be,” said Arnold, 43, a consultant who arrived in a Volvo wagon toting VCRs. “I’m into the three R’s — reduce, reuse, recycle.”
The city and county have put together what they call the Take It Back Network to identify electronics recyclers such as Total Reclaim that pledge to do the right thing with e-waste.
The program features 21 recyclers in King County that fill out a form agreeing not to ship the waste to Third World nations; to make sure that all recyclable materials actually get recycled into real products; and to keep state and county officials informed of the quantities of materials they process.
While the government doesn’t have the staff to check on these claims, it appears that the participating businesses are complying, said Lisa Sepanski, project manager for King County.
“I rely on their word that they’re going to do this,” she said. “It’s also a liability issue for them. If they’re handling these things in an inappropriate manner and their customers think they’re complying with the (Take It Back) agreement, they could get into legal trouble, because they’re misrepresenting their services.”
The idea of reusing or recycling old electronic equipment has been around since before there were computers. It got a big boost in 2001 in a report based in part on Seattle-based activist Jim Puckett’s trip to Guiyu, China, where he uncovered serious pollution from sham recycling operations designed mostly to retrieve precious metals and trash the rest.
The findings of that study were echoed in another report last week by Greenpeace International documenting pollution in Guiyu and New Delhi, India.
“Children are involved in this, running around mountains of waste in bare feet,” said Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and chairman of the Computer Takeback Campaign. “That’s not really recycling at all. It’s hazardous-waste-dumping on the poor.”
The United States is the only developed nation that has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty governing trade in potentially hazardous waste. Europe ended years of conflicts between national laws there by embracing a comprehensive recycling system for electronics. But in the United States, even those in the electronics and electronics-recycling industries admit the situation lags far behind.
Addressing state legislators in Seattle last week, Smith outlined how activists in this country have basically given up on their goal of the past several years of getting the federal government to come up with a national system that ensures e-waste gets recycled properly.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle P-I:
Recycling of electronics encouraged