These monitors are headed for the shredder. (Photo courtesy of Intechra)

Thick plumes of reddish-orange smoke rise from the buckets as the worker, unprotected except for a pair of latex gloves, jokes with Michael Zhao, a Chinese?born University of California journalism student. Last year, Zhao traveled to his home country to film eDump, a 20-minute documentary about the "informal" electronics recycling industry in the town of Guiyu.

Known throughout the world as a dumping ground for so-called e-waste, Guiyu imports more than a million tons of obsolete computers, cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and other electronics every year, mostly from the U.S. Dealing with this chaotic mountain of circuit boards, monitors and capacitors makes up 80 percent of the local economy. It replaced subsistence farming 20 years ago as the primary means of survival.

"Get away—you can't handle this, it's too choking," the man stirring the buckets says to Zhao. "You'll regret it if you're poisoned. Get going quick."

In the background is the sound of Zhao, in fact, choking. He asks the workers about their own safety.

"Us? We've been disinfected, high-temperature disinfection," someone replies as a woman giggles.

After a couple of minutes, his eyes burning from the toxic fumes, Zhao takes the worker's advice and leaves.

"My eyes just couldn't function in that shack where they're getting gold out," Zhao told the Advocate in a recent interview. "My eyes burned really quickly. They probably had the same reaction in the first couple of weeks, then they just manage to say, 'OK, I'm used to it. This is my job.'"

While global warming has taken center stage in the world's environmental consciousness over the last decade, another more immediate problem—what to do with our outdated computers—has already resulted in more than a billion pounds of lead entering the environment, along with millions of pounds of heavy metals and toxic elements of plastic, according to Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, based in San Jose, Calif. A typical trashed CRT, for example, contains some eight pounds of lead.

And like global warming, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation not to sign on to a United Nations?sponsored protocol, known as the Basel Convention, to prevent e-waste from being shipped by developed countries to developing countries.

"All 27 European Union countries have domestic laws that make it illegal to send hazardous waste to developing countries," says Sarah Westervelt of the Seattle?based Basel Action Network, a nonprofit group working to push the U.S. toward addressing e-waste at the federal level. Westervelt says the absence of federal legislation has resulted in a Wild West atmosphere that has left local officials around the country "scrambling to keep these toxic materials and heavy metals out of solid waste landfills."

Indeed at a hearing last month, the Committee on Science and Technology in the House of Representatives said that although 13 states have e-waste laws, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that "at most only 15 percent of products at the end of their useful lives reach a recycling or re-use program." According to the EPA, some two million tons of used-up electronics go to landfills or incinerators every year, but only 345,000 tons are recycled.

In Connecticut, environmentalists celebrated when an e-waste law passed last year. But the bill has not yet become law, and was delayed this year by tweaks that modify how television manufacturers are charged to support the program.

If all goes well, by July 1, 2009, your town will provide free recycling of your home computers, television and other electronic devices, and the entire operation will be paid for by the manufacturers, not the taxpayers.

"What we're committed to is producer responsibility. The manufacturer has to play a bigger financial role in the recycling of product," says Tom Metzner, an analyst with the state Department of Environmental Protection who is the agency's e-waste expert.

The Connecticut law is closely based on a law passed in Maine last year, which Metzner says was the first to hold manufacturers responsible for paying the costs of recycling televisions and computers. Computer manufacturers pay fees based on the actual number of their units collected for recycling, while television manufacturers pay based on their market share.

In California, which passed the nation's first e-waste law in 2005, consumers pay an advance recovery fee up front of $5 or $10, meaning the state gets involved in the process, administering the program. Metzner says there was a proposal to implement an advance recovery fee here too, but it was rejected by the DEP and the legislature.

"In my opinion (the advance recovery fee) is a tax," says Metzner. "Not only that, in California it requires 80 people for the program. I thought it was overly bureaucratic. Number two it absolved manufacturers of responsibility."

Under Connecticut's law, money flows directly from manufacturers to recyclers to cover their costs of disassembling computers and other electronics and parting them out, ensuring that toxic materials are properly disposed of. The state DEP approves the recyclers and sets the regulations, but stays above the fray in terms of the day-to-day administration of the program.

Metzner admits that manufacturers will likely bill their recycling costs back to consumers by including them in the price of their products, but says there will be a strong incentive to keep those recycling costs low with better product designs. Leading manufacturers are already on the recycling bandwagon, according to Metzner.

"They don't want somebody going overseas and filming a huge pile of monitors with their name on it," he says.

Windsor-based Intechra, one of the leading electronics recyclers in the country, has built a squeaky-clean 80,000-square-foot facility to take in the computers, printers and PDAs of Fortune 1000 companies from around the country, including most of the big names in Hartford.

Plant manager Kevin Lindsay's crew of 85 workers goes through an average of 48,000 computers monthly, with 75 percent of those coming from "all over Connecticut."

The goal is to resell as much of the equipment as possible, and Intechra even goes so far as to make repairs where feasible. But inevitably, some of the machines find their way back to the EOL (End of Life) area, the last stop in the expansive, high-ceilinged space. Stripped down to their metal frames, the machines are scrapped out for their copper and power supplies and more, but there's a limit to what Intechra can handle, such as the lead-loaded CRTs.

"We don't touch any toxic stuff," says Lindsay. "We're going to send them to a vendor."

Intechra's Rike Sandlin says the company does send computers to Southeast Asia, but none go to Guiyu or anywhere similar. "We actually audit the companies we send materials to," says Sandlin. "A lot stays in the U.S., some goes to Asia and other developing nations that need the raw materials."

The EPA, in fact, makes the argument that so-called e-waste is actually a vital source of raw materials and cheap computers for developing nations. "This reuse avails many people in developing countries with information technology that would otherwise be unaffordable for them," says EPA Spokesman Dale Kemery.

While acknowledging unsafe recycling exists, the EPA insists that "most e-waste exports are dealt with properly."