14 February 2003 (St. Paul, Minnesota) – A Latino immigrant stands in front of a battered computer on a small table. His weathered hands move nimbly around the plastic box. He pops off its side and tears out the wiring.

His power drill whines and sputters as he attacks the screws that fasten the emerald-colored circuit boards to the chassis. He pulls the boards out when they come loose, and throws the computer's empty shell into a growing pile.

A dozen men work alongside him, pulling the guts out of old electronics, in Asset Recovery Corporation's cavernous warehouse here, near the Mississippi River. Dysfunctional and just plain old computers and monitors enter through a loading dock and are moved along, as if at a slaughterhouse. Still-functional equipment might be resold online to someone looking for a deal. The rest end up in barrels full of computer chips, circuit boards, and wire.

"This is where we pride ourselves as far as managing computer electronic equipment," says Ryan Laber, the company's marketing director. "All of these guys are specialized in the demanufacturing of computers and electronics."

That means they can open up a computer and find the valuable steel, aluminum, copper, and the chips, which contain gold. They also know what to do with a computer's many poisons: the components containing mercury, the cadmium in the batteries, the PCBs, and the monitors and circuit boards, which are heavy with lead.

Because of those toxins, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and many other colleges in the state bring their old computers here -- often at great cost. Last year, the University of Minnesota system spent more than $100,000. In 2003, it could spend more than $150,000.

Disposing of old computers is a great expense and a logistical nightmare for colleges across the country, and the problem promises to become even more challenging. Many institutions have not begun to grapple with it -- even as students and faculty members push administrators to buy computers that are faster, more powerful, or more compact, thereby adding to the pile of machines to dispose of.

During the boom of technology in education, colleges bought computers by the truckload. Now the institutions have to be careful about how they throw those aging computers away. Legislators in some states, including California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, and Virginia, have proposed or passed laws that ban the disposal of electronic waste. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency already regulates the disposal of large quantities of hazardous waste, which includes computer monitors, televisions, and other electronics. The agency has proposed exempting computer monitors from the regulations if the equipment is recycled and not put in a landfill.

College administrators also have to cope with demands from campus activists, who have identified electronic waste as the next big environmental issue. "Campuses in our strategy are important," says Ted Smith, of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a group involved in the issue. The environmental groups, including student organizers, hope to educate and pressure colleges to adopt environmentally friendly computer-recycling efforts.

Differing Approaches

For now, computer recycling, and knowledge of it among faculty members and administrators, varies widely among colleges. Many institutions have a process that takes old computers, identifies the working ones, and puts them to use or gives them to charity. However, some of those programs are run department by department, not organized for an entire campus. And some broken or unwanted computers may end up in landfills, where they can leach toxins into groundwater.

Some examples of the way colleges are dealing with this issue:

• The University of North Dakota strips its old computers for parts and sells some computers to the public. The equipment that doesn't sell goes to a landfill.
• Texas A&M University at College Station tries to place its old computers with state agencies and recycles the rest through prison labor.
• Every week at New York University, computers discarded by students and the university fill a 35-foot truck, which heads out to a recycler in the Bronx, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year. In its contract with NYU, the recycler promises not to send the scrap overseas.

By contrast, some colleges have not at all decided how to deal with their electronic waste. For the past two years, Dominican University, in River Forest, Ill., has devoted a room to the cannibalized hulls of old computers and dysfunctional monitors -- 200 at last count. It would cost $4,000 to unload the computer pile at the local landfill, an option that does not sit well with some people on the campus. So the computers sit in limbo.

Bob Cernock, director of information technology, would rather see them go away. Scrap them, shred them, bury them -- "I would find any of those viable as long as it fell within in the laws of the area," he says. Until recently, Georgetown University was also temporarily storing its electronics. When Patricia J. Dollar was hired as solid-waste manager two years ago, there were two truckloads full of computers sitting on the campus, waiting for a home or a grave. "Electronics recycling is the single biggest disposal problem we have in this country right now," but colleges are largely unprepared, she says. "They haven't been setting aside the money to deal with this."

Georgetown spent $50,000 last year to recycle its broken electronics through Unicor, a federal-government corporation that uses prison labor. The university gives its working computers to various nonprofit groups. Ms. Dollar is wary of "scams" -- junk dealers who show up posing as church charities. "I get approached twice a week," she says. The dealers would probably strip out the valuable materials and dump the computers in a ditch, she suspects. "If someone finds them there," she says, "it's a Mike Wallace moment."

On the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus, where green politics are popular, the facilities managers and information-technology officials set up a centralized recycling program three years ago, after county laws in Minneapolis prohibited sending electronics to landfills. "We were just trying to make sure we took care of our regulatory obligations," says Gene H. Christenson, the chemical-waste manager.

Where Old Machines Go

The computer-recycling process resembles that at other institutions, like the University of Oregon. Student employees pick up old computers at departments around the Twin Cities campus and bring them to a workshop. The students erase the data on the hard drives, test each component, and separate the functional or reparable material from the lost causes. The working computers go to a showroom out front, where they are sold for a song: An Apple G3 tower, a 19-inch monitor, and an electronic whiteboard all go for less than half of what they might cost new.

The program serves as a filter, catching equipment with some useful life left. "In the past nine months, we have been able to refurbish 600 computer components" out of about 4,000 computers dropped off at the used-computer store, says Renee Halvorson, who supervises the operation, which costs the university about $2,000 a month to run. "We aren't able to recoup all the costs from the resale. It gets back to doing the right thing."

Irretrievably broken computers and burned-out monitors go to Dana Donatucci, who supervises waste management from a squat building in an industrial neighborhood near the campus, in Minneapolis. In a corner of the building, near tightly bound bales of plastic bottles and cardboard, sit four-foot-high boxes on pallets, crammed with computer equipment. Mr. Donatucci fills about 20 of those boxes every two weeks.

"Ninety-five percent of what we handle is computers," he says, as a breeze kicks up the scent of soured soft drinks. He digs through the pile and finds an old radio, a television, and a spectrophotometer, probably from the 1970s. He once charged departments 10 cents a pound to bring such equipment here, but he found that they did not want to pay. Now his facility takes the junk without charge and eats the cost of recycling: more than 400,000 pounds last year, at 30 cents a pound. The per-pound rate has more than doubled in the past few years.

Despite the cost, the university sends its computer equipment to Asset Recovery Corporation's facility here. The company, which employs many recent immigrants and ex-convicts, has pledged not to send scrap overseas or to use prison labor to recycle the material. In promotional literature, the recycler bills itself as "the responsible choice." Asset Recovery says it sends leaded circuit boards to a company in Canada, monitors to a glass recycler in Ohio, and mercury components to a processor in central Minnesota.

The company, which started out mining mainframe computers, makes money from the useful materials it can pull out of the junk. It annually recycles enough steel to make two billion nails and enough gold to make more than 50,000 wedding rings. Some of the functional equipment is salvaged and resold on eBay.

In the end, Mr. Donatucci gets paperwork confirming that his computers were recycled lawfully. He fears that he could be fined if one of his computers later turned up in a dump, or abandoned by the side of the road, or put on a ship headed for Asia.

That last scenario is of increasing concern to some campus-waste managers. The export of electronic scrap to third world countries is a hot topic in recycling and environmental circles. According to the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based watchdog group that follows the trade of toxic materials, most so-called electronics recyclers in the United States are junk exporters. The group estimates that 80 percent of American electronic waste goes to China, India, Pakistan, or the Philippines. Exporting the waste is 10 times as profitable as processing it domestically.

Al Breuer, director of environmental health and safety at Minnesota State University at Moorhead, has tried mightily to keep its computers from ending up in Chinese landfills. He donates working computers to groups that teach immigrants and the elderly about technology. Junk computers pile up until there are enough to make an efficient delivery, then they are shipped 200 miles to Asset Recovery and another recycler in the area for processing. It's important to Mr. Breuer that the scrap is processed domestically. If he learned otherwise, "I'd wring their necks," he says.

One shipment of old computers did slip through his hands in September 2001. He had briefly passed the job of recycling electronics to another employee, whom he won't name. That employee found a sweet deal with an out-of-state recycler, which picked up 22 pallets of computer equipment and charged Moorhead only $665. "Do you know how cheap that is?" Mr. Breuer exclaims, explaining that a truckload of computer parts shipped to Asset Recovery might cost $12,000. "Once I heard about that, I took the responsibility right back."

He suspects, with good reason, that the 22 pallets of computer parts were shipped to China. Last year, the Basel Action Network sent a film crew to China to document what happens to junked electronics there. The setting of the resulting documentary, Exporting Harm, is Guiyu, a town swamped by plastic computer shells, broken circuit boards, discarded toner cartridges, and burned copper wire.

According to the documentary, the people there work for about $1.50 a day, mining what gold, copper, aluminum, and other metals they can salvage. But they don't seem to recognize the hazards of their work. The film shows villagers cooking circuit boards over a fire to remove the lead solder and get at the gold in the chips. To remove a copper yoke from the back of a monitor, they smash the lead-embedded cathode-ray tube with a hammer, then dump it into an irrigation ditch.

Within just six years, rashes, respiratory illnesses, and miscarriages have become common among the villagers. The film crew tested the groundwater in the area and found that lead levels were 2,400 times as high as what the World Health Organization finds acceptable. Flatbed trucks loaded with barrels of clean water arrive in the town every day.

The filmmakers examined the ownership stickers found on some of the junk computers in Guiyu. The equipment had belonged to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, school districts in Los Angeles, and the Kentucky Department of Education, among other sources. One sticker said "Property of State University" but didn't reveal the state.

Another label, attached to a broken plastic shell, was once stuck to a computer at Minnesota State University at Moorhead.

Galvanizing Students

The arresting images in Exporting Harm won considerable attention among environmental activists when the film was released last year. Now college activists use it to galvanize campus support for electronics recycling and to educate students about the issue.

Even some of the student activists were surprised by what they saw. "At first I thought it was hard to believe," says Jessica H. Eagle, a senior majoring in anthropology, who is an environmental activist at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass.

"Then when they zoomed in on all the junk, it made me think, What if that was my printer that I just threw away last year?"

Moorhead's Mr. Breuer has not seen the film but was appalled by what he was told it showed. "This is what I've always been worried about," he says.

Activists like Ms. Eagle are pressuring their colleges to adopt a recycling policy that bars sending junk overseas. The environmentalists also object to cheap prison labor, which is widely used to recycle electronics. They say it exploits prisoners and undermines an otherwise viable domestic electronics-recycling industry.

In reply, free-market proponents argue that if the electronics-recycling industry can't compete, it shouldn't be in business. "I don't believe companies should be told to recycle if it doesn't make economic sense," says Jerry Taylor, director of natural-resources studies for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. He adds that some landfills have been designed to absorb electronic waste and its various toxins.

Going After Corporations

Activist students are also pressuring computer companies to create "greener" computers -- as some manufacturers in Japan and Europe already do -- and to adopt a "take back" policy that allows individual consumers to return their computers to the companies at no charge. (Such policies are rare for consumer products in the United States.) For now, only Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have such policies, and the consumer has to pay to ship the computer back.

"When students come on to the campus, they get a Dell," Ms. Eagle says. "Once they go through the college and need a new computer, what will they do with the old one?"

The popularity of Dell on campuses across the country has prompted a coalition of activist groups to start an informational Web site, ToxicDude.com, that spoofs Dell's advertising tagline, "Dude, you're getting a Dell."

"Our corporate target is Dell because they have the most institutional buying contracts with schools," says Kara E. Reeve, a recent graduate of Holy Cross who is a member of Clean Water Action, a national group. For the Massachusetts chapter, she is organizing campaigns at Boston and Mount Holyoke Colleges; Boston, Brandeis, and Tufts Universities; and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

At Holy Cross, Ms. Eagle set up a table, stopped students, and showed them Exporting Harm on a video monitor. She got local news coverage when, at a campus forum on the recycling issue, the mayor of Worcester spoke in support of her group. College administrators then formed a committee to respond to the activists. The college, which leases Dell computers, will have a set of computers to dispose of this summer, and it has taken the environmentalists' suggestions to heart.

"We are identifying and working with different vendors that plan to purchase computers from the college, refurbish the computers, and sell them," says Jennifer A. Ruggiero, an assistant director in the information-technology department. "There are enough vendors around here that do that business, so there's no reason we can't find one that supports what we are trying to do."

Don K. Brown, Dell's director of environmental affairs, takes issue with almost all of the activists' complaints. He argues that prison labor improves prisoners' lives, and that Dell is "on track" to offer a lead-free computer by 2006. Lead is the most prevalent toxic component in computers -- 2 to 10 pounds per machine, depending on whom you ask.

He also points out that Dell offers a recycling program for institutions, although he won't say how many colleges take advantage of it. The company's environmental report says that it recycled fewer than 160,000 machines in 2002; analysts say the company sold more than 13 million machines that year.

Peter C. Kellogg, director of information-technology projects at the College of William and Mary, recently signed up with Dell's take-back program. It has proved to be a good deal, he says. In three years, at the end of the lease cycle, he will buy the computers from Dell for a dollar each. Then Dell will buy the computers back for $100 each and knock off $60 each to transport them back to the company. "In the end, we will net $40" per computer, Mr. Kellogg says.

When he set up the new lease, no one mentioned prison labor, which Dell uses for some of its institutional-recycling contracts. "That's an issue I don't want to touch," he says, thinking for a moment. "If there was a lot of pushback from the community, I would re-evaluate the program."

Dell's salespeople did talk about the recycling program, Mr. Kellogg says. "They told me about their'big green machine,'" a device that smashes old computers into tiny parts, then uses magnets and filters to salvage the gold, aluminum, steel, and plastic.

He figures that the leasing contract will be cheap enough, and green enough, to allow William and Mary to continue turning over its computers every three years. "I thought that was a good thing for the college," he says, "because we try to be as environmentally sound as possible."

http://www.chronicle.com

Section: Information Technology

Volume 49, Issue 23, Page A33