Toxic e-waste is “flowing off [U.S.] shores every day to substandard operations” 
Basel Action Network (BAN), an e-waste watchdog led by Executive Director Jim Puckett, has been tracking waste for two years by using geo-locating tracking devices which are inserted into old computers, TVs and printers. BAN and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) joined together to make the devices, and place them inside products for recycling, dropping them off at “donation centres, recyclers and electronic take back programmes, enterprises that advertise themselves as ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘earth friendly’ and ‘environmentally responsible’”.
The US is the biggest producer of technical waste in the world, and US citizens send approximately 50,000 trucks to the recyclers every year. This waste is toxic and contains materials like “lead and mercury” which can harm people and the environment. Approximately a third of the waste that was tracked went overseas, some as far as 12,000 miles away, and includes six of the electronic trackers that were supposed to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.
These were found in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. More often though, they were tracked to rural Hong Kong and China has become known as the “world’s biggest graveyard for America’s electronic junk.” The US is the only industrialised country in the world that hasn’t sanctioned the Basil Convention.
Puckett said: “People have the right to know where their stuff goes. Unfortunately, we are seeing considerable backsliding in the electronics industry today compared to just a few years ago. Toxic e-waste is flowing off our shores every day to substandard operations, harming people and the environment across the globe. Meanwhile, these exports deprive our own nation of green jobs and make it difficult for responsible electronics recyclers to compete and survive. It’s still a dirty little secret. It’s still a story that needs to be told.
But many recyclers say that the problem is exaggerated. Eric Harris of the institute of Scrap Recycling Industries said that “the vast majority of electronics collected for recycling in the US are recycled in the US. We would really challenge the notion that there’s a mass exodus of equipment that’s leaving in an unprocessed manner”.
However, BAN has found that Goodwill and Dell have exported devices instead of recycling in the US, and that this is in violation of Dell’s “strict policies”, and were likely to be “illegal under the laws of the importing countries”. Dell has refused to say who their recyclers are, and Goodwill does not even “have a policy against export to developing countries”.
Puckett added: “Goodwill and Dell have had strong reputations for social and environmental responsibility. Our findings, however, shake the foundations of that public trust, and cry out for the implementation of immediate reform when it comes to e-waste management. These must include stronger, enforced policies of greater due diligence, and transparency.”
BAN aims to carry on the use of tracking technology, as they “believe its use will play a pivotal role in holding an errant and troubled electronics recycling industry to account”. They will also make “this service available to other civil society organisations, governments, as well as large enterprises”.
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