When you dutifully deposit your old computer at the local dump, it’s recycling of a sort, but probably not quite what you had in mind. Industry experts say 50-80 percent of the electronics collected for recycling ends up on container ships bound for Asian dumping grounds, where its toxic components begin their journey into bloodstreams and watercourses. Electronic waste is the fastest growing disposal problem in the world. From the industrial backwaters of mainland China to rapidly industrialising regions of India and Pakistan, a wide range of electronic devices and appliances are being received and recycled in conditions that imperil the health of the recyclers, their communities, and their environments. Most of the components in these devices are recovered by poor, often migrant scavengers and sold for reuse. But in the process they and the environments around them are exposed to heavy metals like mercury, lead, beryllium, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants that leave lethal residues in bodies, soils, and watercourses.
Those who do the disassembling in the Asian E-waste industry are most often the most marginal of their societies, rural migrants driven by poverty to city shantytowns. Unable to find steady employment, they settle instead for a scavenging life in which just to survive in the short term, they must perform tasks that most know imperil their survival in the long term. Entire families, including children, disassemble computer monitors and other electronics, using tools little more sophisticated than hammers and screwdrivers without even the most rudimentary protective equipment. Children play in waterways laced with lead and mercury. Families ferret out filaments of copper and tiny ingots of gold which they sell for pocket change to middlemen who in turn sell the raw materials back to manufacturers.
Governments and electronics firms have long known about the hazardous effects of this “effluent of the affluent” and as early as 1989 drafted the Basel Convention, an international treaty dealing with the global trade in toxic wastes. In 1994 it was strengthened to ban the export of all hazardous wastes from rich to poor countries, even for the purpose of recycling. Alone among developed countries, the US has refused to ratify the Basel Convention and has consistently sought to undermine its implementation.
Yet as with so many other global agreements, the rest of the world has ceased waiting for the US to lead and has instead taken the initiative itself. The European Union has already implemented the Basel Convention, banning the export of all hazardous wastes to developing countries for any reason. More importantly, the EU is readying a comprehensive set of regulations that will require electronics manufacturers selling to its 25 member countries to bear the responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products, taking them back at the end of their useful life and phasing out their toxic components. For its part, Japan is mandating more stringent manufacturing criteria reducing toxic components and instituting mandatory take-back programs.
With the world’s largest base of affluent, well-educated consumers, the EU is poised to replace the US as the standard-setter for the world’s electronics industry, and with it much else besides. And despite its defiant posture, even the Bush administration has begun to recognize this rapidly emerging reality.
The core concept behind the European approach to the e-waste problem is “extended producer responsibility”, the principle that producers should be held responsible for the full “cradle-to-grave” lifespan of their products. Faced with having to deal with the detritus of their short-lived inventions, manufacturers suddenly become more ingenious about reducing their toxic burdens and reusing their most valuable components.
Indeed, some innovative redesign specialists are proposing that both manufacturers and consumers think of their computers and other electronics not so much as products to be purchased but as services to be used. Most computer components in this maturing technology remain relatively consistent from year to year, yet we keep throwing them away in a year or two only to buy, at high cost, another box that but for a faster processor is largely the same. We must then buy an extended warranty just to enable the computer to last its fleeting lifetime. What if instead we bought basic “boxes” containing the core components from the manufacturer, who as part of a long-term service agreement would then maintain the machine on a regular basis and install upgrades as they become available? The usable lifespan of computers would then extend to five or more years instead of the one or two we now hold onto them.
To adopt such an approach would require shelving the manufacturer’s survival strategy of planned obsolescence and the consumer’s conditioned preference for ceaseless novelty. But by imposing the responsibility for downstream impacts on the upstream producer, the EU might just start to reverse the river’s flow. Facing the EU’s impending regulations, major US manufacturers find themselves in the uncharacteristic position of lobbying their own government to match Europe’s standards so they won’t face the expense of building different computers for different markets or competition from corner-cutting competitors.
What if, instead of the American-led “globalisation 1.0” we see the launch of a European-led “globalisation 2.0”, based on the simple principle, familiar to every first grader, that you clean up any mess you make?
Mark Sommer directs the Mainstream Media Project, a US-based effort to bring new voices and innovative ideas to the broadcast media.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2005.
