Shipping the problem abroad
As consumers, we see computers in their productive prime, as suppliers of information and entertainment. We are not present for their bleak interments, or their difficult births. Despite the vast resources required for their manufacture, computers are closer to razor blades than refrigerators in their life expectancy.
The average computer’s working life is three to five years. Cell phones are even worse, lasting only 18 months before being discarded. Televisions fare best, averaging 15 years. The advent of digital TV, however, is expected to produce a tsunami of trashed analog models over the next few years.
In the PC market, the combination of quickly changing technology, low prices for standard desktops, and a lack of standardization among manufacturers leads to brisk turnover. Few computer users upgrade; in many cases, it’s not even possible, and most junk the CPU along with its monitor, printer, scanner, speakers, and other peripherals in favor of a new package. When its time is up, the computer rarely goes to a better place. Nationally, only 10 percent of e-waste is recycled, and a meager 2 percent is reused. Countless other machines, dating back to the advent of the Apple II in the late ’70s, are piled up in warehouses, attics, and basements.
Most domestically dumped computers, however, are sent abroad. In High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics and Human Health (Island Press, 2006) environmental writer Elizabeth Grossman posits that 80 percent of US electronic waste is shipped overseas, primarily to Asia, but also to Africa. The consequences rival the worst horrors of the Industrial Revolution.
The Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based advocacy group, has filmed documentary footage in the Chinese towns of Taizhou and Guiyu, centers of primitive computer recycling. Convoys of trucks arrive, day and night, loaded with computers and other electronics, which they dump into small mountains on the ground. Workers in backyard workshops bash apart CPUs and monitors with hammers, and then attack them with pliers. Metals are immersed in vats of acid, and circuit boards melted down over open flames. The air is thick with toxins, and there is no safety gear or provisions for dealing with the waste. The carcasses of junked machines line rivers, and toxic metals leach into the water supply.
In Guiyu, the subject of the 2002 film Exporting Harm, ID tags bearing the names of US school districts, government agencies, banks, and hospitals are visible. What had previously been farmland is now effectively a toxic waste dump. Although people no longer drink the water, it is still used for washing, because of the cost of bottled water. Moreover, fish from polluted rivers are still eaten, and children swim and play in toxic rivers and streams. The e-waste processing industry in such areas has been going strong for a decade, and respiratory, gastric, and skin problems are common. The long-term effects are even grimmer.
The Basel Convention, an international agreement on the disposal of hazardous wastes, is designed to prevent such abuses. The US, however, has not ratified this accord, and it has no explicit prohibitions on the export of dangerous materials. “Oversight of exported used electronics is limited,” concluded a US Government Accountability Office report on e-waste. But the US is not alone in exporting its tech junk — there are billions of electronic items worldwide, and e-waste from Europe, Japan, and other wealthy places routinely winds up in poorer countries.
