http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/65163
So I guess at this year's MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs (technophile nerds hail him as "His Steveness") unveiled the $1,800 ultra-light and thin MacBook Air. A very impressive device, but it got me wondering where all our old computers and electronics go after we discard them in favor of the newest, coolest, "must have" gadget? Coincidentally, National Geographic had a recent report:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/high-tech-trash/carroll-text.html
Yet another consequence of our high-turnover, wasteful consumer economy, especially in terms of electronics. So while big fish stockholders like Jobs get rich for every stupid geek who forks over $1,800 for an Air, poor people and the planet suffer when we discard our "obsolete" $1,800 computer that was hot a couple years ago. I'm still operating on a Celeron and 2004 AMD chip just fine! All our "e-waste" might net some money at the recycling center, and then it is whooshed away to gadget heaven (maybe to be reincarnated as a new boom box for a kid in Shanghai?) and we feel like good, conscientious consumers. But the truth is not so noble, even if we adopt the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. What we buy and what we throw out have serious human health, environmental, and social consequences for millions of people who will never know us. The Third World gladly accepts our junk because they are poor and don't have many better choices to scrape out a living. They're willing to put themselves and their neighbors at risk from our horrible toxins to scavenge scrap metals/parts to hock for a few dollars. But just because they accept our hazardous waste doesn't mean we have the right to dump it on them. Would a gun store sell a rifle to an insane person with a criminal record and be able to sleep at night? I'm not saying that poor people are insane to take our trash, but it doesn't absolve us of our guilt just because our accomplice/victim gives consent.
As usual, European governments are way ahead of us on proper e-waste recycling and management. Some of us have also complain about China spiking its products with harmful lead, but where do you think they got all the lead?
Ultimately, shipping e-waste overseas may be no bargain even for the developed world. In 2006, Jeffrey Weidenhamer, a chemist at Ashland University in Ohio, bought some cheap, Chinese-made jewelry at a local dollar store for his class to analyze. That the jewelry contained high amounts of lead was distressing, but hardly a surprise; Chinese-made leaded jewelry is all too commonly marketed in the U.S. More revealing were the amounts of copper and tin alloyed with the lead. As Weidenhamer and his colleague Michael Clement argued in a scientific paper published this past July, the proportions of these metals in some samples suggest their source was leaded solder used in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards.
"The U.S. right now is shipping large quantities of leaded materials to China, and China is the world's major manufacturing center," Weidenhamer says. "It's not all that surprising things are coming full circle and now we're getting contaminated products back." In a global economy, out of sight will not stay out of mind for long.
All this reminds me of a recent personal experience. L and I volunteer with Saint Vincent de Paul, and occasionally the group rents a truck to pick up second-hand clothes/housewares from parishioners to resell at a Goodwill-like thrift store, and then use the proceeds to buy food for the needy. Usually 4 masses of people won't donate enough to fill a 20-foot truck. But this year the org said that they would also accept e-waste. WHAT A MISTAKE! The truck was full by 10AM. People brought over 40-year-old TVs (the kind your grandma had, encased in hardwood and weighing 150 pounds), broken microwaves, and all sorts of junk that they just wanted to purge from their bursting garages and storage units (all you living in suburbia know what I mean). This was supposed to be a donation to help the needy, not a waste pickup! Actually thrift stores lose over 30% of their revenues on disposing of un-sellable/hazardous crap that people just dump on them in violation of donation rules. Who is doing whom the favor? Needless to say, our group had very sore backs at the end of the day and vowed to never again accept people's e-waste. The head priest was also quite upset that the unsightly pile of junk spoiled the atmosphere for a wedding that was going on that weekend.
http://www.newhouse.com/junk-disposal-costs-thrift-stores-big-money-4.html
http://www.theindependent.com/stories/082004/new_junk20.shtml
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High-Tech Trash: Will your discarded TV end up in a ditch in Ghana?
By Chris Carroll
June is the wet season in Ghana, but here in Accra, the capital, the morning rain has ceased. Soon the muddy track is flanked by piles of old TVs, gutted computer cases, and smashed monitors heaped ten feet (three meters) high. Beyond lies a field of fine ash speckled with glints of amber and green—the sharp broken bits of circuit boards. I can see now that the smoke issues not from one fire, but from many small blazes. Dozens of indistinct figures move among the acrid haze, some stirring flames with sticks, others carrying armfuls of brightly colored computer wire. Most are children.
Choking, I pull my shirt over my nose and approach a boy of about 15, his thin frame wreathed in smoke. Karim says he has been tending such fires for two years. He pokes at one meditatively, and then his top half disappears as he bends into the billowing soot. He hoists a tangle of copper wire off the old tire he's using for fuel and douses the hissing mass in a puddle. With the flame retardant insulation burned away—a process that has released a bouquet of carcinogens and other toxics—the wire may fetch a dollar from a scrap-metal buyer.
Each day scrap sellers bring loads of old electronics—from where he doesn't know. Mensah and his partners—friends and family, including two shoeless boys raptly listening to us talk—buy a few computers or TVs. They break copper yokes off picture tubes, littering the ground with shards containing lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, a carcinogen that damages lungs and kidneys. They strip resalable parts such as drives and memory chips. Then they rip out wiring and burn the plastic. He sells copper stripped from one scrap load to buy another. The key to making money is speed, not safety. "The gas goes to your nose and you feel something in your head," Mensah says, knocking his fist against the back of his skull for effect. "Then you get sick in your head and your chest."
People have always been proficient at making trash. Future archaeologists will note that at the tail end of the 20th century, a new, noxious kind of clutter exploded across the landscape: the digital detritus that has come to be called e-waste.
An unstated corollary to "Moore's law" is that at any given time, all the machines considered state-of-the-art are simultaneously on the verge of obsolescence. The memory and graphics requirements of Microsoft's recent Vista operating system, for instance, spell doom for aging machines that were still able to squeak by a year ago. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an estimated 30 to 40 million PCs will be ready for "end-of-life management" in each of the next few years.
Computers are hardly the only electronic hardware hounded by obsolescence. A switchover to digital high-definition television broadcasts is scheduled to be complete by 2009, rendering inoperable TVs that function perfectly today but receive only an analog signal. As viewers prepare for the switch, about 25 million TVs are taken out of service yearly. In the fashion-conscious mobile market, 98 million U.S. cell phones took their last call in 2005. All told, the EPA estimates that in the U.S. that year, between 1.5 and 1.9 million tons of computers, TVs, VCRs, monitors, cell phones, and other equipment were discarded. If all sources of electronic waste are tallied, it could total 50 million tons a year worldwide, according to the UN Environment Programme.
So what happens to all this junk?
In the United States, it is estimated that more than 70 percent of discarded computers and monitors, and well over 80 percent of TVs, eventually end up in landfills, despite a growing number of state laws that prohibit dumping of e-waste, which may leak lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium, and other toxics into the ground. Meanwhile, a staggering volume of unused electronic gear sits in storage—about 180 million TVs, desktop PCs, and other components as of 2005, according to the EPA. In theory, recycling gold from old computer motherboards is far more efficient and less environmentally destructive than ripping it from the earth, often by surface-mining that imperils pristine rain forests.
Currently, less than 20 percent of e-waste entering the solid waste stream is channeled through companies that advertise themselves as recyclers. Yet recycling, under the current system, is less benign than it sounds. Dropping your old electronic gear off with a recycling company or at a municipal collection point does not guarantee that it will be safely disposed of. While some recyclers process the material with an eye toward minimizing pollution and health risks, many more sell it to brokers who ship it to the developing world, where environmental enforcement is weak.
Environmental groups and many undeveloped nations called the terms too weak, and in 1995 protests led to an amendment known as the Basel Ban, which forbids hazardous waste shipments to poor countries. Though the ban has yet to take effect, the European Union has written the requirements into its laws. The EU also requires manufacturers to shoulder the burden of safe disposal. Recently a new EU directive encourages "green design" of electronics, setting limits for allowable levels of lead, mercury, fire retardants, and other substances. Another directive requires manufacturers to set up infrastructure to collect e-waste and ensure responsible recycling—a strategy called take-back. In spite of these safeguards, untold tons of e-waste still slip out of European ports, on their way to the developing world.
In the United States , electronic waste has been less of a legislative priority. One of only three countries to sign but not ratify the Basel Convention (the other two are Haiti and Afghanistan), it does not require green design or take-back programs of manufacturers, though a few states have stepped in with their own laws. "We're definitely trying to channel market forces, and look for cooperative approaches and consensus standards," Hale says. The result of the federal hands-off policy is that the greater part of e-waste sent to domestic recyclers is shunted overseas.
"We in the developed world get the benefit from these devices," says Jim Puckett, head of Basel Action Network, or BAN, a group that opposes hazardous waste shipments to developing nations. "But when our equipment becomes unusable, we externalize the real environmental costs and liabilities to the developing world."
Asia is the center of much of the world's high-tech manufacturing, and it is here the devices often return when they die. China in particular has long been the world's electronics graveyard. Vandell Norwood, owner of Corona Visions, a recycling company in San Antonio, Texas, remembers when foreign scrap brokers began trolling for electronics to ship to China. Today he opposes the practice, but then it struck him and many other recyclers as a win-win situation. "They said this stuff was all going to get recycled and put back into use," Norwood remembers brokers assuring him. "It seemed environmentally responsible. And it was profitable, because I was getting paid to have it taken off my hands." Huge volumes of scrap electronics were shipped out, and the profits rolled in.
Any illusion of responsibility was shattered in 2002, the year Puckett's group, BAN, released a documentary film that showed the reality of e-waste recycling in China. Exporting Harm focused on the town of Guiyu in Guangdong Province, adjacent to Hong Kong. Guiyu had become the dumping ground for massive quantities of electronic junk. BAN documented thousands of people—entire families, from young to old—engaged in dangerous practices like burning computer wire to expose copper, melting circuit boards in pots to extract lead and other metals, or dousing the boards in powerful acid to remove gold. China had specifically prohibited the import of electronic waste in 2000, but that had not stopped the trade.
Today the salvagers operate in the shadows. Inside the open door of a house in a hillside village, a homeowner uses pliers to rip microchips and metal parts off a computer motherboard. The man won't reveal his name. "This business is illegal," he admits, offering a cigarette. In the same village, several men huddle inside a shed, heating circuit boards over a flame to extract metal. Outside the door lies a pile of scorched boards. In another village a few miles away, a woman stacks up bags of circuit boards in her house. She shoos my translator and me away.
Yet for some people it is likely too late; a cycle of disease or disability is already in motion. In a spate of studies released last year, Chinese scientists documented the environmental plight of Guiyu, the site of the original BAN film. The air near some electronics salvage operations that remain open contains the highest amounts of dioxin measured anywhere in the world. Soils are saturated with the chemical, a probable carcinogen that may disrupt endocrine and immune function. High levels of flame retardants called PBDEs—common in electronics, and potentially damaging to fetal development even at very low levels—turned up in the blood of the electronics workers.
China may someday succeed in curtailing electronic waste imports. But e-waste flows like water. Shipments that a few years ago might have gone to ports in Guangdong or Zhejiang Provinces can easily be diverted to friendlier environs in Thailand, Pakistan, or elsewhere. "It doesn't help in a global sense for one place like China, or India, to become restrictive," says David N. Pellow, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies electronic waste from a social justice perspective. "The flow simply shifts as it takes the path of least resistance to the bottom."
In Accra, Mike Anane, a local environmental journalist, takes me down to the seaport. "You want computers?" he asks. "How many containers?" All around the city, the sidewalks are choked with used electronics shops. In a suburb called Darkuman, a dim stall is stacked front to back with CRT monitors. These are valueless relics in wealthy countries, particularly hard to dispose of because of their high levels of lead and other toxics. Apparently no one wants them here, either. A price tag on one of the monitors bears the label of a chain of Goodwill stores headquartered in Frederick, Maryland, a 45-minute drive from my house. A lot of people donate their old computers to charity organizations, believing they're doing the right thing. I might well have done the same.
To make ends meet, he tells me, he works nights and weekends exporting used computers to Ghana through his brother. A Pentium 3 brings $150 in Accra, and he can sometimes buy the machines for less than $10 on Internet liquidation websites—he favors private ones, but the U.S. General Services Administration runs one as well. Or he buys bulk loads from charity stores. (Managers of the Goodwill store whose monitor ended up in Ghana denied selling large quantities of computers to dealers.) Whatever the source, the profit margin on a working computer is substantial.
In the long run, the only way to prevent it from flooding Accra, Taizhou, or a hundred other places is to carve a new, more responsible direction for it to flow in. A Tampa, Florida, company called Creative Recycling Systems has already begun. The key to the company's business model rumbles away at one end of a warehouse—a building-size machine operating not unlike an assembly line in reverse. A conveyor belt transports material from the shredder through a series of sorting stations: vibrating screens of varying finenesses, magnets, a device to extract leaded glass, and an eddy current separator—akin to a reverse magnet, Yob says—that propels nonferrous metals like copper and aluminum into a bin, along with precious metals like gold, silver, and palladium. The most valuable product, shredded circuit boards, is shipped to a state-of-the-art smelter in Belgium specializing in precious-metals recycling. According to Yob, a four-foot-square ( 1.2-meter-square) box of the stuff can be worth as much as $10,000.
In Europe, where the recycling infrastructure is more developed, plant-size recycling machines like David are fairly common. So far, only three other American companies have such equipment. David can handle some 150 million pounds (68 million kilograms) of electronics a year; it wouldn't take many more machines like it to process the entire country's output of high-tech trash. But under current policies, pound for pound it is still more profitable to ship waste abroad than to process it safely at home. "We can't compete economically with people who do it wrong, who ship it overseas," Joe Yob says.
Ultimately, shipping e-waste overseas may be no bargain even for the developed world. In 2006, Jeffrey Weidenhamer, a chemist at Ashland University in Ohio, bought some cheap, Chinese-made jewelry at a local dollar store for his class to analyze. That the jewelry contained high amounts of lead was distressing, but hardly a surprise; Chinese-made leaded jewelry is all too commonly marketed in the U.S. More revealing were the amounts of copper and tin alloyed with the lead. As Weidenhamer and his colleague Michael Clement argued in a scientific paper published this past July, the proportions of these metals in some samples suggest their source was leaded solder used in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards.
"The U.S. right now is shipping large quantities of leaded materials to China, and China is the world's major manufacturing center," Weidenhamer says. "It's not all that surprising things are coming full circle and now we're getting contaminated products back." In a global economy, out of sight will not stay out of mind for long.
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There's a great book called "Dead Cities" about the decline of the
American city by Mike Davis. It's a good read, and I highly recommend
it. There's a great chapter about how Steve Wynn is an environmental
terrorist.
But there's also a chapter on Los Angeles where Davis talks with two
illegal immigrants from Mexico who get a job tearing apart old
computers to recycle. Basically they are in the hot sun all day in an
e-landfill smashing computers to bits. They work for minimum wage and
live in an $1,100 apartment with 4 other men, hoping to make enough
money to bring their families here. It had been a year or two since
the men had seen their families, and Davis asks why they came here and
continue to work for peanuts. One of them smiles genuinely and says
"Because I want to work in your high tech economy." It's just a
really tragically ironic scene.
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Jeez that is quite a tale. And the sad part is those Mexicans enjoy much better working/living conditions than their competitors in China or Africa. Thanks for the book recommendation M! Damn Steve Wynn - he's also a social terrorist considering all the familes who have been destroyed by gambling problems in his greed palaces. "Visit the Wynn, but please gamble responsibly!" Can you imagine all the food and utilities waste that goes in his mega Macau and Vegas casinos?
I ordered the Davis text, thx M! Here's a synopsis of his sequel Planet of Slums:
From Publishers Weekly
Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population, detailing poor urban communities from Cape Town and Caracas to Casablanca and Khartoum. Davis argues health, justice and social issues associated with gargantuan slums (the largest, in Mexico City, has an estimated population of 4 million) get overlooked in world politics: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion." Though Davis focuses on individual communities, he presents statistics showing the skyrocketing population and number of "megaslums" (informally, "stinking mountains of shit" or, formally, "when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery") since the 1960s. Layered over the hard numbers are a fascinating grid of specific area studies and sub-topics ranging from how the Olympics has spurred the forceful relocation of thousands (and, sometimes, hundreds of thousands) of the urban poor, to the conversion of formerly second world countries to third world status. Davis paints a bleak picture of the upward trend in urbanization and maintains a stark outlook for slum-dwellers' futures.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. -------
Yeah, Mike Davis has some interesting books; I read his original, City of Quartz
and I've also got Ecology of Fear on my desk right now. He's a bit uneven and
sometimes makes more of things than there actually is, but he's got a knack for
noting the insanity of the modern city and how captialism/development has
created those.
From what people have told me, probably is best book City of Quartz, even though
it's 15 years old. I highly recommend it, especially if you want to get your LA
hate on. Pretty much everyone in LA is *still* talking about that book.
