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E-waste: top U.S. export?
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E-waste is piling up in the U.S. and in countries thousands of miles away.
There are plenty of options for recycling electronics products in the Bay Area. A simple search of the Internet yields dozens of recycling centers and programs in local cities for disposing those unwanted or unusable goods. But the bigger questions remain: where does all this recycling actually go after the goods are “deposited” and why can’t we build products that can be more easily reused?
The answer to the first question is somewhat ominous. While we would all like to believe that our unwanted Dell or Apple laptop gets broken down and safely recycled out of existence, the truth is that many of the components stay very much intact and are shipped to poorer third world nations such as Ghana. This sad fact was startlingly revealed earlier this year in a broadcast of Frontline , the PBS investigative TV program.
Ironically, two larger countries – India and China – who are already doing a fine job of producing tons of e-waste products on their own, are also the recipients of U.S. recycled goods too. The amount being shipped out is staggering. Recent data estimates that Americans dispose of over 2 million tons of TVs, cellphones and computer equipment each year. And, there are estimates that at least 50 to 80 percent of this ends up getting shipped overseas.
The answer to why these products can’t be built for easier reuse is more complicated. The technology industry has always been about speed and reliability. More recently, it has also been about safety. The prevailing widespread use of materials such as lead and mercury, help make our e-products perform better and improve energy efficiency, but they must also be packaged in ways that protect the consumer. This process doesn’t lend itself to being housed in flimsy recyclable cardboard.
Rick Callahan of the Associated Press recently wrote an excellent article that summarizes the efforts of some U.S. states to grapple with the e-waste problem across the country, a task that Congress has been so far quite happy to ignore. But until the vast majority of the U.S. has some semblance of an aggressive recycling program in place, the refuse will continue to pile up in our local landfills and in countries far, far away.
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