Unfortunately, the reality is that obsolete equipment is rarely recycled in an environmentally friendly manner. Instead, the majority of this equipment ends up being ferried from the United States to third-world countries, where the most expensive materials are extracted and the rest is discarded into large e-waste dumps.

A Dirty Habit

“The practice in the U.S. and virtually in the entire developed world for managing scrap electronics is to load the stuff into a shipping container and send it to a developing country where very low-cost labor is used to tear it apart and recover components and raw materials. Usually, that’s done with little regard to worker safety and absolutely no regard for the environment in the local area,” says Bob Houghton, president of Redemtech. “What can’t be easily recovered from the machines is simply dumped.”

The difficulty is that this waste is often extremely hazardous. Computer products contain many nasty compounds, including lead, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl), and halogonated materials. The prevailing practice is to send these components overseas because many developing nations, such as China, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam, and India, have less-restrictive environmental regulations, allowing the dumping and incineration of the developed world’s e-waste. The irresponsible handling of hazardous e-waste has created mounting problems in these countries, as they’ve acted as the world’s landfill for such materials for decades.

“It has created a tremendous amount of environmental damage, and in the areas that have a lot of this going on have created a lot of health problems . . . for reasons as easy to understand as a high lead content in the water,” Houghton says.

The problem only continues to grow as business and personal use of computers and electronics continue to skyrocket and the issue of e-waste remains unnoticed. Currently, electronic waste makes up approximately 2 to 5% of the entire U.S. waste stream, and that number continues to grow. Meanwhile, businesses and individuals still rarely recycle. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2001, only 11% of all computers were recycled. And many of these so-called “recycling” businesses and programs actually only recycle a fraction of the computer and continue to send the rest to third-world nations.

“Even the folks who have what you would expect to be complete recycling, closed recycling processes where they’ve got big shredders and separators and a very robust capital investment in the machinery process, a lot of those folks are still taking the low-value output from their process and shipping it overseas where it can be dumped,” he says, emphasizing that even many municipal recycling programs end up unwittingly sending e-waste overseas.

“What is very common practice is for the material to be sort of laundered through a series of brokers on its way to Vietnam or whatever developing country might be the case,” he says. “So, if you only peel back the onion one layer, it looks like the recyclers took it from the collection event and sold it to a materials refiner in New Jersey. But what did the refiner in New Jersey do? He probably extracted a few things from it then sold it to a refiner in Atlanta, who sent it overseas.”

The biggest difficulty is the fact that even though it might be morally unsound to export such hazardous materials, as long as the equipment is not dumped on U.S. soil, these companies are within their legal rights to do so.

Legal Responsibility & Social Responsibility

So, given the facts, how can a company that wishes to abide by legal rules also be socially responsible? Houghton says that it can be tough, given the “laundering” of equipment. However, it isn’t impossible. It is expensive, though.

Redemtech specializes in helping corporations, and even SMEs, recycle their equipment in a truly environmentally healthy fashion. In order to cut down on costs, Houghton suggests that businesses first think about the total life span of their equipment. In some cases he’s helped businesses identify certain categories of equipment that they could expand the life span for and put off an expensive retirement process. Once the true end of life has been reached, it’s a matter of potentially finding ways to reuse equipment, he says.

Reuse can happen in several ways. First, it might make sense to take stock of old equipment and figure out if it contains components, such as memory, power supplies, and hard drives, that can be used to either repair or upgrade other existing systems. Equipment that hasn’t been stripped of these parts but is still functioning might also be eligible for other forms of reuse. Certain organizations, such as TechSoup, specialize in programs that connect businesses with nonprofit organizations that accept older machines as donations for less fortunate people or even organizations that may have a need for computers. This is not only socially responsible but also a potential tax deduction.

When You Must Recycle

If an organization still must put some old systems out to pasture after this, Houghton says the most important factor is partnering with a recycling organization with a very transparent process.

His company specializes in working with downstream partners that must sign a contract of stewardship that requires them to never send materials to third-world nations for dumping. And Redemtech doesn’t just rely on a partner’s word.

“We’ve got a team of folks in an environmental management group whose responsibility it is to audit our downstream refiners. They do that on a quarterly basis—their audits include environmental, worker’s safety, and a financial audit. Our refining partners are required to completely open their doors and allow our auditors complete access, so we are able to produce a very detailed chain of custody that starts when the client puts in a service request at their facility and extends all the way through our process to the end-of-life refining process,” he says.

Houghton suggests that businesses look for recycling partners with a similar level of auditing capabilities to ensure that their recycled equipment is being handled in the way they wish. While it might cost more to do so, it is ensuring the future sustainability of electronic production and environmental health for all of the world’s nations.

On Board With The Basel Convention

One of the reasons that the United States continues to dump e-waste on developing nations is because there are no regulations or laws preventing businesses from doing so. By ratifying the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, many developed nations have agreed to legally stop this irresponsible practice. However, the United States has chosen not to ratify Basel or to enforce similar restrictions. Businesses in the United States can still hold themselves up to Basel standards by working with recycling companies that have signed BAN’s (Basel Action Network’s) Electronics Recycler’s Pledge of True Stewardship. Based in Seattle, BAN is a nonprofit group focused on eliminating the practice of toxic trade. While its pledge isn’t as enforceable as a law, it is a start.

The following are some recyclers who have signed the pledge:

Asset Recovery
www.assetrecoverycorp.com

Global Investment Recovery
www.girpm.com

Maxim Industries
www.4scrap.com

Redemtech
www.Processor.com/Redemtech

Total Reclaim
www.totalreclaim.com