Businesses and many environmentally conscious consumers today pay at least $8 per item to keep worthless PCs and other electronic devices from polluting landfills.

The issue promises to escalate with the proliferation of cell phones and the switch to digital television, prompting the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently to devote an entire pavilion to exhibitors of green solutions.

Those consumer electronics often contain lead, mercury, cadmium, and other materials toxic to the environment.

Colorado law requires nonresidential organizations to treat consumer electronic items - PCs, color monitors, cell phones, color TVs, etc. - as hazardous waste and record their disposition. Two states - California and Massachusetts - require residents to recycle those items properly, and other states have legislation pending. Colorado does not, but environmental organizations encourage residents to pay the price and recycle.

At Eco-Cycle in Boulder (www.ecocycle.org), an environmentally sensitive consumer can pay $10 to $15 to get rid of a television, $10 for a computer monitor, and $8 for a printer or PC. The company recycles cell phones, keyboards and mice at no charge.

"We guarantee that over 98 percent of a computer will get recycled," said Bryan Ukena, program manager. Eco-Cycle disassembles the items and salvages the precious metals, lead, glass and even plastic. Last year, Eco-Cycle recycled 175 tons of electronics, extracting 1,700 pounds of lead.

Many other recyclers make the same "98 percent" claim, including Unicor, which operates a chain of controversial plants within the federal penitentiary system. The prisoners who volunteer for the program get to keep half their wages.

"We recycle people's lives," said Karen Smith, at the Unicor booth at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But some groups complain that Unicor doesn't meet federal standards for working conditions (Unicor denies it) and that the company benefits from a form of quasi-slave labor.

And this is just a glimpse of the complaints and concerns by environmental groups over the handling of electronics waste, or e-waste.

Groups worry that individual consumers have inadequate motivation to dispose of e-waste properly, that government and manufacturers have failed to intervene, and that the amount of e-waste is growing.

The Grass Roots Recycling Network (www.grrn.org) estimates that there could be 300 million to 600 million obsolete personal computers in the U.S. by the end of 2004, and only 10 percent of those will be recycled. The rest will sit in warehouses, garages or basements - or landfills.

Worse yet, say environmental groups, some so-called recycling companies simply ship the e-waste to other countries, where no laws specify the proper method of disposal. In particular, China has become a dumping ground for U.S. e-waste, the groups say.

The Silicon Valley Toxins Coalition (www.svtc.org) refers to the practice as "exporting harm."

Treaties needed

Ukena of Eco-Cycle says the practice of exporting e-waste calls for treaties between the key countries.

"They dump it in a parking lot and people go through it and try to pull out the value," he said. "They have hammers that they use to bust the glass. It looks like they're stir-frying these integrated circuit boards. They literally burn (the items) to pull out the gold value. And the toxicity is going right into the air."

Many consumer electronics have small amounts of gold for electrical connections.

Manufacturers have eliminated some toxic elements, such as lead, in newer items; but new technologies, such as plasma screens, have introduced toxics such as mercury.

Also, in an effort to reduce the cost of new items, manufacturers have eliminated some valuable elements that made the items worth recycling. With less gold inside the PC, recyclers have difficulty justifying the labor required for disassembly.

Since consumers typically won't spend money to recycle voluntarily, environmental groups want manufacturers to implement programs in which the manufacturers take back the obsolete items and reimburse consumers for the shipping.

Germany has already legislated such as a process. Hewlett-Packard accepts the items from collection points (such as Eco-Cycle) but so far refuses to reimburse consumers for shipping to the collection point, said David Wood, program director for the Grass Roots Recycling Network, in Madison, Wis.

The GRRN has targeted Dell for a full "TakeBack" program, urging the leading PC manufacturer to absorb all costs. In response, Dell implemented a program in September in which it pays for recycling, but not shipping.

"We don't want people throwing their computers into the trash," said Michele Glaze in Dell's public affairs office. "That's not the appropriate thing to do with technology of any kind. This recycling program is one of our first steps to help consumers."

She didn't know how many consumers who had taken advantage of Dell's program, but she acknowledged, "It's not as successful as we would like it to be. We would like to see this program grow and grow."

Dell's business model makes it a prime candidate for the TakeBack program, Wood said, because Dell accumulates so much information about customers from the original sale. Dell could easily, for instance, use the data to print a shipping label and send it to a customer.

Shipping costs range from $7 to $50, depending on weight, Glaze said.

Upfront payment

Some groups have advocated an "upfront" payment for recycling, in which consumers pay for a credit to have the item recycled at the point of sale. But that could create a restrictive situation, Glaze said. "The feedback we've gotten is, the customers would rather pay for something on the back end . . . then they get to determine how they (recycle) it," she said. "They might prefer to donate it. If I'm a high-end user and I give it away every 18 months, there's still a lot of value there."

That leaves schools and charities to worry about what to do with those old 486-chip processors that nobody wants. (See story below.)

"We certainly don't take as many of those donations as as we have in the past," said Sandra Just, principal at Rishel Middle School in Denver. "We first check to see whether they will fit in with what we have in the building. I wouldn't say we've accepted lots (of computers). Nor have we been approached at the same rate that we were in the past."

Worrisome trends

While some environmental groups hope for technological advances that require fewer toxins in PCs and other electronics, at least two trends promise to make their missions more challenging.

One, cell phone use is growing in the U.S., and the older ones are becoming increasingly harder to pawn off on other countries as "re-programmed" items. Last year there were about 135 million cell phone users in the U.S., up from 97 million in 2000. That trend is expected to continue (with some companies experimenting with "disposable" phones).

Two, the federal government wants the television broadcast industry to convert to an all-digital signal by 2006. That would theoretically require a mass conversion to all-digital television sets as well, leaving "tens of millions of old, analog TVs" on the junk heap, said Ukena of Eco-Cycle. Among the hottest items at the Consumer Electronics Show were thin, plasma screen TVs. Sure enough, they promise to compound the recycling problems, too. The technology uses mercury, which someday could leach into the groundwater.

Unless it lands in a parking lot in the Philippines first.