Poisonous detritus of the electronic revolution

Thousands of tonnes of 'e-waste', some of it highly toxic, is being sent 
illegally from Britain to Africa and Asia

John Vidal
Tuesday September 21, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1309066,00.html 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk>

Britain is throwing out more than 1m tonnes of electronic "e-waste" such 
as broken computer monitors and discarded mobile phones every year, and 
new government figures show that more than ever is going abroad.

Last year, 23,000 tonnes of IT and electronic equipment was shipped out 
illegally, mostly to China, west Africa, Pakistan and India.

In one case, the documents on a container waiting to be shipped from 
Felixstowe to Pakistan declared that its contents were innocuous plastic 
packaging. But when customs officers opened it up they found tonnes of 
broken computer monitors and other electronic waste collected by a south 
Wales company which was sending it to Lahore to be dismantled by hand 
for its lead and other valuable toxic contents. The illegal shipment of 
hazardous waste was blocked and returned.

The government's pollution watchdog, the Environment Agency, says the 
e-waste exports are worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Last year such 
waste involved tens of thousands of old computers, 500,000 television 
sets, 3m refrigerators, 160,000 tonnes of electrical equipment and 
millions of discarded mobile phones, all sent to the poorest countries 
in the world.

But the agency admits it has no idea how much of the waste is being 
deliberately dumped on poor countries by companies trying to avoid 
paying increasingly high disposal costs in the UK, and how much is only 
technically illegal because companies have filled in the forms incorrectly.

"It is not necessarily all illegal," said an agency spokesman. "There is 
a legitimate international trade in goods with an overseas market for 
usable equipment such as computers and TVs. Further work will help us to 
find out how much is illegal. Our investigations suggest some exporters 
are not seeking the appropriate legal authorisation."

However, two reports not re leased by the Environment Agency but seen by 
the Guardian suggest the problem is far greater than the government 
wants to admit.

One, by the Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling (Icer), 
is based on confidential interviews with businesses and concludes that 
most computer exports are certainly waste because the goods are neither 
tested nor repaired before export.

Another, by Impel, a grouping of six European countries' environment 
agencies including Britain's, says that exporters are finding new ways 
of bypassing the rules and that governments have neither the resources 
nor the will to give any priority to checking what leaves the country.

"Priorities for enforcement are low, and as a consequence only little or 
no capacity is reserved for enforcement ... Follow-up actions cannot be 
carried out. Enforcement of legislation is absolutely needed," say the 
report's authors.

Impel's ongoing study of six major European ports, including Felixstowe, 
has found that 22% of all the waste exports checked for more than a year 
were illegal. Enforcement agencies in the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, 
Poland and elsewhere found large quantities of computer equipment, 
electrical cable, cathode ray tubes, single-use cameras, old tyres, and 
oil and contaminated motor parts being exported.

In many cases the authorities had to let the shipment go because they 
could not tell what equipment was reusable or what was obsolete.

Many of the containers inspected showed misleading information about 
their contents and origin, and the report suggested scrap exporters were 
trying to confuse the authorities. One tactic, it noted, was to "port 
hop" - send waste from one European des tination to another, leaving a 
trail of documents which are impossible to check. A shipment of British 
single-use cameras complete with batteries was sent to Germany, where it 
was twice repacked before being shipped to China for "recycling".

China and India, thought to be the target of most e-waste exports, have 
urged Britain and other rich countries through the UN and other 
international forums to stop exporting hazardous waste because they do 
not have the facilities to inspect all the traffic being sent.

EU environment agencies agree. "No one can pretend that port authorities 
in India or Asia are not immune from corruption and abuse. It is far 
more difficult to carry out inspections at the port of destination," 
says the Impel report.

The scale of the trade and the damage it is doing is becoming clear. A 
major investigation by an international coalition of environmental 
groups earlier this year found huge quantities of e-waste being exported 
to China, Pakistan and India, where it was being reprocessed in 
operations extremely harmful to both human health and the environment.

The groups, including Basel Action Network (Ban), Silicon Valley Toxics 
Coalition, Toxics Link India and Greenpeace, found e-waste mixed with 
scrap metal from Japan, South Korea, the US and the EU, and identified a 
town called Guiyu, some 200 miles north-east of Hong Kong in the coastal 
province of Guangdong, where up to 100,000 migrant labourers break up 
and reprocess obsolete computers from around the world.

The work involves men, women and children unaware of the health and 
environmental hazards of dismantling such goods - processes that include 
the open burning of plastics and wires, acid used to extract gold, the 
melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking 
and dumping of toxic lead-laden cathode ray tubes.

Already Guiyu has become so polluted that well water is undrinkable and 
water has to be trucked in for the entire population, the report said.

"We found a cyber-age nightmare," said Jim Puckett of Ban. "They call 
this recycling, but it's really dumping by another name. Yet to our 
horror, we discovered that rather than banning it, governments are 
actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real 
solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated."

The groups appealed to global manufacturers to take responsibility for 
their electronic products and phase out the dangerous substances found 
within them.

"It is ironic that these elec tronic discards are being collected in 
industrialised countries for the purpose of dumping them in poor 
countries. Asia is the dustbin of the world's hazardous waste," said Von 
Hernandez of Greenpeace International.

Exports of e-waste are set to rise sharply in the next few years as 
European laws covering electrical and electronic goods insist that scrap 
is recycled and barred from being burned in incinerators.

"People want the latest electronic gadgets, but they come at a price," 
said Claire Wilton of Friends of the Earth. "Computers and televisions 
contain toxic materials. It's the responsibility of manufacturers to 
design goods, computers and DVD players that are re-usable and recyclable."

Enemy within

What's in a typical 27kg (60lb) desktop computer

Electrical and electronic equipment uses a multitude of components that 
contain carcinogens such as lead and arsenic, plus precious metals such 
as copper and gold. The recycling and disposal of such components is 
lucrative but poses serious health risks and environmental dangers

Plastics - 6.26kg

Lead - 1.72kg

Silica - 6.8kg

Aluminium - 3.86kg

Iron - 5.58kg

Copper - 1.91kg

Nickel - 0.23kg

Zinc - 0.6kg

Tin - 0.27kg

Also present are trace amounts of manganese, arsenic, mercury, indium, 
niobium, yttrium, titanium, cobalt, chromium, cadmium, selenium, 
beryllium, gold, tantalum, vanadium, europium, and silver.

· Source: Microelectronics and Computer Technology corporation (MCC). 
Electronics industry Environmental roadmap


Special report
Waste and pollution <http://www.guardian.co.uk/waste/0,12188,747275,00.html>

Net notes
11.07.2002: Rubbish 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,753609,00.html>
01.08.2002: Rats 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/netnotes/article/0,6729,767655,00.html>

Useful links
Waste and recycling - Defra 
<http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/index.htm>
Government 'are you doing your bit?' recycling campaign 
<http://www.doingyourbit.org.uk/>
Community Recycling and Economic Development programme 
<http://www.rsnc.org/cred/>
Community Recycling Network <http://www.crn.org.uk/>
Waste and Resources Action Programme <http://www.wrap.org.uk/>
UK Recycled Products Guide <http://www.recycledproducts.org.uk/>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




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