Green IT & Green Hosting

Bearing Down on E-Waste

07/11/11

An insight into the shameful practice of illegally dumping e-waste

Trade and treatment of e-waste in the UK is regulated under the EU WEEE Directive, a key goal of which is to promote recycling and so reduce the amount of e-waste going to landfill. An important aspect is the 'Producer Responsibility Principle', making producers responsible for financing the collection, treatment and recovery of waste electrical equipment.

The directive entered into force in the UK in 2007.

The EU's 'Waste Shipments Regulation' also controls the trade in hazardous waste entering and leaving Europe. Under this regulation, shipments of certain types of hazardous waste, including e-waste, from the EU to countries not members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is prohibited. The UK is also a party to The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, which came into force in 1992.
It has 175 parties, and aims to protect human health and the environment against adverse effects resulting from the disposal of waste.

ILLEGAL TRADE

Under the convention, it is illegal to trade hazardous waste across national borders, if the importing country does not consent to receive the waste. The key issue is understanding what is classified as waste and what can be legally exported as second-hand goods. Many environment agencies throughout Europe use what is commonly referred to as correspondents' guidelines.29.

The guidelines lay out a set of criteria for determining whether a piece of equipment is WEEE or just electrical and electronic equipment (EEE).

Basically, an electrical item is considered waste if:

• The product is not complete, but essential parts are missing = It shows physical damage impairing its functionality or safety
• The packaging for protecting it from damage during transport, loading and unloading operations is insufficient
• The appearance is generally worn.

To prove an electrical item is not waste, exporters of EEE are asked to adhere to these guidelines, which include the following criteria:

• All items must be functionality tested
• Each item should be sufficiently packaged to protect it from damage during transportation and loading
• A record should be attached to each item, containing an identification number, the name and address of the company responsible for functionality testing, and details of functionality tests performed.

FIGHTING BACK

Computer Aid International - highlighted as an example of best practice in reuse in the Environmental Investigation Agency's 'System Failure: The UK's harmful trade in electronic waste' exposé - has welcomed the report. "We have been actively campaigning to put a stop to illegal e-waste export for a number of years.

Despite the WEEE Directive, every year thousands of containers of e-waste make their way from the most developed countries, including the UK, to dumping grounds in Africa, China and India. Absent or poorly enforced environmental and worker safety legislation allow unscrupulous waste traders to exploit the lower labour costs in these countries and maximise the profit to be gained by recovering the precious materials in e-waste.

However, due to the toxic content in electronics, rudimentary recovery methods pose great risks to the health of workers - some of whom are children - and to the environment."

One of the reasons that this toxic trade is possible is because fraudulent traders are posing as legitimate reuse and recycling organisations - as recently highlighted in Green IT magazine - and enticing unwitting businesses to use them for the disposal of electrical equipment. These traders don't declare the contents of their shipments as hazardous e-waste, but falsely claim consignments consist entirely of electrical equipment destined for productive reuse in developing countries.

Computer Aid believes that, to eliminate the health and environmental impacts of electronics, and to maximise the resource potential in waste electrical and electronic equipment, governments must:

• Ban the import and export of e-waste. Countries that already have bans in place should enforce them
• Ban the landfill and other dumping of e-waste.
• Equipment must be sent to legitimate licensed operators; if functional, it should be reused and if non-functional, safely recycled Prioritise reuse over recycling for functional equipment.

LEGITIMATE OPERATORS

As the CAI emphatically points out, reuse is up to 20 times more energy efficient than recycling. It also wants to see laws in place that compel e-waste recycling , but only through legitimate operators. "E-waste contains valuable resources that should be recovered, but recycling must be done in ways that do not harm human health and the environment," it states.

It also wants to see governments enact producer responsibility, in order to fund e-waste management and promote eco-design. "This shifts the environmental burden of treating e-waste away from communities and incentivises electronics producers to design greener products, such as those with less toxics and greater reusability and recyclability."

And it advocates an enforcement policy whereby illegal e-waste activity is punished.

"Governments must ensure that all producers are registered and all e-waste handlers are licensed. They must also dedicate sufficient resources to the bodies responsible for the effective monitoring and policing of the system."

Computer Aid’s environmental advocacy officer Haley Bowcock adds: "The fact that we are continuing to see e-waste from wealthy countries like the UK being dumped on countries without safe recycling facilities highlights gaps in existing legislation and its enforcement that desperately need to be filled. There also remains an unfair distribution of costs and benefits of the digital revolution."

Having the right controls in place is critical, as the challenges relating to e-waste are massive, as can be seen by taking a quick global tour. Not only is there an untold amount being dumped illegally, but there is a vast untapped stockpile yet to surface. For example, many old electronic goods are quietly gathering dust in storage, waiting to be reused, recycled or thrown away.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as much as three quarters of the computers sold in the US are stockpiled in garages and closets. These also end up in landfills or incinerators when thrown away or, more recently, are exported to Asia.

Again, toxic chemicals in these electronics products can leach into the land over time or are released into the atmosphere, impacting nearby communities and the environment.

In many European countries, regulations have been introduced to prevent electronic waste being dumped in landfills, due to its hazardous content. However, the practice still continues in many countries.

In Hong Kong, for example, it is estimated that 10-20% of discarded computers go to landfill. Incineration releases heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury into the air, and ashes. Mercury released into the atmosphere can bio accumulate in the food chain, particularly in fish - the major route of exposure for the general public. If the products contain PVC plastic, highly toxic dioxins and furans are also released. Brominated flame retardants generate brominated dioxins and furans when e-waste is burned.

REUSE ABUSE

"Reuse is a good way to increase a product's lifespan," points out Greenpeace. "Many old products are exported to developing countries. Although the benefits of reusing electronics in this way are clear, the practice is causing serious problems because the old products are dumped after a short period of use in areas that are unlikely to have hazardous waste facilities."

When it comes to recycling, although this can be a good way to reuse the raw materials in a product, the hazardous chemicals in e-waste mean that electronics can harm workers in the recycling yards, as well as their neighbouring communities and environment, Greenpeace points out. "In developed countries, electronics recycling takes place in purpose-built recycling plants under controlled conditions."

DANGER TO CHILDREN

In many EU states, plastics from e-waste are not recycled, so as to avoid brominated furans and dioxins being released into the atmosphere. In developing countries however, there are no such controls. Recycling is done by hand in scrap yards, often by children. Moreover, the amount of e-waste routinely exported by developed countries to developing ones, often in violation of the international law, as we have seen, has now reached staggering proportions. Inspections of 18 European seaports in 2005 found as much as 47% of waste destined for export, including e-waste, was illegal.

In the UK alone, at least 23,000 metric tonnes of undeclared or 'grey' market electronic waste was illegally shipped in 2003 to the Far East, India, Africa and China. In the US, it is estimated that 50-80% of the waste collected for recycling is being exported in this way. This practice is legal, because the US has not ratified the Basel Convention.

"Mainland China tried to prevent this trade by banning the import of e-waste in 2000," adds Greenpeace. "However, we have discovered that the laws are not working; e-waste is still arriving in Guiya of Guangdong Province, the main centre of e-waste scrapping in China. We have also found a growing e-waste trade problem in India. 25,000 workers are employed at scrap yards in Delhi alone, where 10-20,000 tonnes of e-waste is handled each year, 25% of this being computers."

Clearly, the US needs to get its own house in order and effect policies that do not prevent other countries from dealing diligently with the illegal dumping of e-waste. For only a concerted and unified global approach will have any real impact on what has become a scandalous, and often deadly, trade.

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