Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (23 page)

Tapping away at my keyboard was probably doing me little harm, I figured, but it wouldn’t take much for my sleek little ThinkPad to morph into a corrosive contaminant. Crushed in a landfill, it would leach metals into soil and water (remember, all landfills eventually leak); in an incinerator, it would exhale noxious fumes, including dioxins and furans, that would taint both fly and bottom ash. Everything must to go somewhere—the environmental scientist Barry Commoner said it long ago, and I understood it implicitly now. But when I learned that fourteen of the fifteen largest Superfund sites were metal mines, it made me wonder: if we continued to take metals from the ground, solder them into consumer electronics, and then dump those components into fresh holes in the ground, wasn’t it only a matter of time until those holes became Superfund sites, too?

I felt guilty about the afterlife of my computer, but the processes that gave birth to this miracle machine were equally troubling. According to a United Nations University study on the environmental impact of personal computers, it takes about 1.8 tons of raw materials to manufacture your average desktop PC and monitor. According to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, mining operations in 2003 released nearly 3 billion pounds, or 45 percent, of all toxics released by US industries: mining is the nation’s largest industrial polluter. And we are a nation that
has
environmental laws. In the rush to supply our demand for new copper, coltan, gold, silver, and palladium—the stuff that fuels our ’lectronic lifestyles—African and Asian nations are tearing up their hillsides and hollows. Some gorilla populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been cut nearly in half as the forest has been cleared to mine coltan, a metallic ore comprising niobium and tantalum. Coltan is a vital component in cell phones, of which Americans discard about a hundred million a year.

Could a computer be recycled? I’d heard some murmurings on the subject, but computer recycling seemed to mean different things to different people. At one end of the spectrum were individuals giving or selling their working computers to others in need. At the other end were dealers who accumulated broken computers, cannibalized them for parts, and junked the rest. How did they get their source material? I had a chance to find out when my network router quit connecting me to the Ethernet. I relegated this mysterious black box, a chunk of plastic the size of a hardcover book, to my basement until a local recycling group organized an e-waste drop-off. Around the nation, charities, environmental groups, and municipalities were organizing similar drives, some of which collected nearly twenty tons in a single day.

I arrived at my collection site, at the north end of Prospect Park, to find several folding tables shaded by white tents and patrolled by clipboard-toting volunteers. The tables were laden with unwanted monitors, scanners, TVs, cell phones, keyboards, printers, mice, cables, and speakers, many of which had absolutely nothing wrong with them beyond a bit of dust and, in the case of the computers, a processing speed that only yesterday seemed dazzling. The spirit of bonhomie under the tents reminded me of the city Parks Department’s Christmas-tree mulching parties, except that instead of returning nitrogen to the earth, we were, presumably, returning precious nuggets of metal to technology. (The parallel was made manifest at another city e-waste event, where volunteers offered fresh compost to anyone dropping off a stale computer.) Passersby pawed through the electronic casbah, taking what they wanted for free. The representative from Per Scholas, a Bronx computer recycler founded in 1995 to supply schools and other nonprofits with hand-me-down computers, could only look on stoically as the good stuff—which he could refurbish and sell—disappeared. The bad stuff—which included my router—was headed his way.

And so was I, on a drizzly winter afternoon. Debarking from the subway in the South Bronx, I made my way under one elevated expressway, across eight lanes of traffic, over the empty loading dock of a rehabbed brick factory building, up a freight elevator, and through a low defile of shrink-wrapped computer monitors stacked on wooden pallets. Ed Campbell, Per Scholas’s director of recycling, led me into a large open room where teams of technicians wiped computer hard drives clean, then loaded the machines with Pentium II microprocessors, memory, and mice. The reconditioned computers, collected from corporations and institutions that paid Per Scholas ten dollars a machine, would be resold, at low cost, to “technology-deprived families.” According to Campbell, Per Scholas’s efforts kept some 200,000 tons of electronic waste from landfills and incinerators each year.

I watched a technician in training squirt a monitor with Formula 409, and then Campbell took me to see the darker side of the computer recycling revolution, where a cavalcade of monitors, some of the most powerful symbols of capitalism’s success, were being smashed, one by one, to smithereens. The broken-down Dells, Apples, and Gateways—most of them collected at community drop-off events—trundled up a conveyor belt and into a shredding machine. “We call this a rough liberation,” Campbell said. “Basically, we’re crushing the computers into glass, plastic, and metals.” Hidden inside the machine’s bland carapace, a series of magnets, eddy currents, and trommel screens separated the shards and spat them into yard-high cardboard boxes called gaylords: ferrous metals here, nonferrous there, plastic on one side, glass on the other. A Per Scholas spokesperson said the metals went to Pascap, a Bronx company that resold them to smelters; the plastic went to a company that melted and pelletized it for resale. Disposing of the glass, which contained lead, presented Per Scholas with its biggest headache to date.

“Glass is a liability, not a commodity,” Angel Feliciano, the company’s vice president for recycling services, told me. “We save it up until we’ve got a truckload, then we pay $650 a ton to a smelter who’ll haul it away.” Lately, the glass had been landing on the loading docks of the Doe Run Company, in south central Missouri. The company separated lead from glass through a process of heating and reducing. It used the resulting silica as a fluxing agent in smelters that produced brand-new sixty-pound ingots of lead from raw ore. The lead liberated from the matrices of CRT glass, said Lou Magdits, Doe Run’s raw-materials manager, was combined with lead recovered from car batteries, ammunition, and wheel weights. And where did all this recycled lead go? “Into car batteries, ammunition, wheel weights, and new CRTs,” said Magdits. (In Peru, where Doe Run operates a lead, copper, and zinc plant, significant amounts of lead rise into the air and fall down as acid rain. Farmers in La Oroya, home of the smelter, have charged Doe Run with contaminating their fields. In 1999, Peru’s Ministry of Health determined that 99 percent of children in the area suffered from lead poisoning. The company, which bought the smelter from the Peruvian government in 1997, has entered into an agreement with the Health Ministry to reduce blood-lead levels in two thousand of the most affected children and claims that safety measures have decreased blood-lead levels in workers by 31 percent.)

One hundred percent of the material dropped off at my e-waste event was, to Per Scholas, “junk.” But at least Per Scholas was handling its junk responsibly. According to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, up to 80 percent of the material collected from well-meaning residents and businesses at e-waste events nationwide is bundled up and shipped overseas, mostly to China, India, and Pakistan. Perhaps half of those computers, the ones that function, are cleaned up and sold. But the remainder are smashed up by laborers who scratch for precious metals in pools of toxic muck.

Investigators from SVTC and the Basel Action Network (whose name refers to the 1992 Basel Convention, an international treaty that seeks to halt trade in toxic waste; the United States refuses to sign it) found men, women, and children in the Chinese village of Guiyu extracting copper yokes from monitors with chisels and hammers. Squatting on the ground, they liberated chips and tossed them into plastic buckets while acrid black smoke rose from burning piles of wire. After harvesting the easy stuff, the workers, who wore no protective gear, swirled a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid in open vats, trying to extract gold from components. Afterward, they dumped the computer carcasses and the black sludge in nearby fields and streams. Tests on the soil and water showed levels of lead, chromium, and barium hundreds of times higher than US and European environmental standards for risk. The accumulating carcinogens, here and in other Chinese coastal towns that accept e-waste, have contributed to high rates of birth defects, infant mortality, tuberculosis, blood diseases, and severe respiratory problems.

I was confounded by the way streams of postconsumer electronics divided and branched, with only a minute percentage of working computers returning to the headwaters of reuse. The computer recycling world, I said to Angel Feliciano, seemed suffused with weirdness. “Yes,” he said to me slowly. “There
is
weirdness. There’s inconsistency. Recycling, as it is today, is a great way for individuals to make money because they can pretend to be doing something.” Feliciano was speaking, naturally, about the other guys, not his company. (In the months to come, though, I’d hear that Per Scholas had established a relationship with a New Jersey recycler that regularly bundles old equipment for sale overseas. At this point, Feliciano was no longer returning my calls.) “There’s no regulation, and it’s more profitable to do the wrong thing,” Feliciano continued. “You ship it overseas. Or you have a sweatshop of people in this country working twelve hours a day for five dollars an hour, taking computers apart by hand and breathing this stuff in. You get into it for the short term. In five years, when you get out, the EPA will be taking a closer look.”

It doesn’t hurt the prospects of the unscrupulous that the general public is at once wildly enthusiastic to “recycle” its electronic waste and wildly ignorant about how this is done. I hate to say it, but it is a bit like the bad old days of curbside recycling in New York: folks had high hopes for the materials they set out, but so much of it—contaminated by food or bereft of an end market—ended up buried. Still, a peanut butter jar in the landfill is one thing: a circuit board in your drinking water is another.

Why is it so difficult to recycle computers righteously? For starters, it is dangerous, labor intensive, expensive, and unrewarding, in the sense that markets for the materials aren’t always large or reliable. Then, there is a playing field tilted in favor of new production and the export of old. Some original computer manufacturers charge forty dollars for repair manuals on their products (instead of putting them on the Web) and lobby to make “gray market” refurbishing illegal in the developing nations where they sell their new models. At the state level, governments spend bond money to build incinerators and operate landfills, but recycling centers have to balance the books on their own. The federal government encourages recycling and reuse, but it doesn’t require it. “If we were paying what we should for virgin resources, e-waste recycling would be much more economical, and local governments perhaps could break even on e-waste recycling,” said Inform’s Eve Martinez, who has set up numerous e-waste collections. But mining companies, like logging companies and the oil and gas industry, continue to benefit from perverse subsidies. Under the 1872 Mining Act, corporations lease land at five dollars per acre, pay no royalties to the government on minerals they extract, and pass any environmental cleanup bills to taxpayers.

As the hazards of e-waste have worked their way into the news, some computer manufacturers have initiated take-back programs in which consumers wipe their hard drives clean, then swaddle, seal, label, and ship their large packages back to original manufacturers. The cost and the inconvenience discourage widespread participation by individuals, which is perhaps what those manufacturers had in mind. They don’t want anyone buying a refurbished computer: they want consumers to buy a new one, preferably from them. IBM’s take-back program was designed for the institutional user looking to either “recover value,” in the company’s words, or “dispose of obsolete assets” (in the first scenario, IBM buys back used equipment; in the second scenario, it hauls those ancient assets away, for a small fee). Hewlett-Packard’s take-back program is friendly to individuals (the company even accepts computers and peripherals it didn’t manufacture), but it is pricey. To mail my laptop, dead router, and one printer would cost me sixty-four dollars, minus the box and packing materials. (The company puts postage-paid labels and envelopes in some printer cartridge boxes.) When I asked staffers at one of the largest computer merchants in New York City about taking back my gently used IBM ThinkPad, they said they didn’t do it, didn’t know anything about it, and had never before been asked about it.

For its part, Massachusetts bans televisions and computers from landfills. Instead, it contracts with a company called ElectroniCycle, based in Gardner, Massachusetts, to process its e-waste. Harvesting material from drop-off events and retailers, ElectroniCycle recovers ten million pounds of electronics a year: technicians refurbish between 5 and 10 percent of their computers for resale; send another 5 to 10 percent to specialty repair houses; and smash the rest into fifty different categories of scrap, including plastic, copper, aluminum, barium glass, and leaded and mixed glass (which is recycled back into cathode-ray tubes). Reusable integrated circuits and memory cards are gleaned, then circuit boards are sent off site for recovery of gold, palladium, silver, and copper. Nothing goes overseas. In California, which also bans e-waste from landfills and from being shipped overseas, retailers that sell hazardous electronic equipment would soon be paying the state an “advance disposal fee” (collected from consumers) of between six and ten dollars per device to cover the cost of recycling. Still, manufacturers aren’t required to participate in the collection or processing of waste.

Every time ElectroniCycle shunts a laptop to the reject pile, I imagine Michael Dell rubbing his hands in glee, like
The Simpsons’
Montgomery Burns when he finally fulfilled his lifelong ambition to blot out the sun. But computer manufacturers’ freedom to pump out product without a thought for its afterlife is probably doomed. The Computer TakeBack Campaign, founded by more than a dozen social-justice and environmental groups, calls for manufacturers of anything with a circuit board to make “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) part of their credo. EPR would shift collection and recycling costs from taxpayers and government to the folks who make and promote these goods. Theoretically, the system would give companies an incentive to make computers and other gadgets that last longer, are made of reusable or fully recyclable materials, contain fewer toxics, and are swaddled in far less packaging.