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By Robert McClure, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter

SEATTLE, Washington, 25 February 2002 -- By recycling 'e-waste,' U.S. harming people overseas, report says

Toting his video camera down an earthen embankment, Seattle activist Jim Puckett trudged toward clouds of smoke at a computer "recycling" outfit in a Chinese village. But when he got there, he found the white plumes were not smoke at all.

Instead, clouds of acrid gas poofed skyward as workers swirled a mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid in open vats, trying to dissolve the gold out of old computer parts. The workers, with nothing to protect their lungs, dumped the leftover gray-black sludge alongside the adjacent river.

For days, Puckett witnessed how little actual recycling went on, and how much waste from used electronic equipment was piling up in and alongside the waterways. A soil sample at one site revealed toxins at rates hundreds of times higher than what would prompt a special Superfund cleanup here.

"It's quite devastating to the environment," Puckett said after his return to Seattle from the Guiyu region northeast of Hong Kong. "It was an eye-opener."

In a report released today based in part on Puckett's voyage, several environmental groups detail how Americans' efforts to do the right thing and recycle old electronic equipment have led to widespread pollution and dangerous working conditions in China, Pakistan and India. Puckett also has heard reports of similar conditions in Vietnam and the Philippines.

"The export of e-waste remains a dirty little secret of the high-tech revolution," says the report by the Basel Action Network, Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and two Asian organizations.

"A free trade in hazardous waste leaves the poorer peoples of the world with an untenable choice between poverty and poison -- a choice that nobody should have to make," the report says.

With advances in technology making computers, televisions and other modern gadgets obsolete at an ever-faster pace, a major dilemma is shaping up: What to do with used electronics equipment? Often it is full of toxic materials, such as the several pounds of lead found in every television and computer screen.

Activists say the United States should follow an international treaty against exporting toxic waste to poor nations and embrace policies like those being adopted in Europe to reduce the amount of toxic material in electronics.

Cathode ray tubes in televisions and computers, as well as computer circuit boards, contain enough toxins to qualify as hazardous waste -- but they are allowed under U.S. law to be exported if they are being "recycled."

At least some electronics recycling here and abroad is done properly. But Puckett and his fellow investigators present evidence in today's report that in at least three countries, the industry is endangering workers' health and the environment.

"The report is going to cause quite a stir," predicted David Stitzhal, a computer waste consultant who represents Seattle, King County, Portland and a number of other Northwest governments in a series of talks focusing on the issue.

With computers in over two-thirds of Seattle homes, this is a local issue as well as an international one.

"Recycling of this stuff is so difficult. And the markets are so immature as we try to deal with all this equipment that we only invented in the last 20 years," Stitzhal said, "that if all of a sudden all these overseas markets are gone, we've got an even more intractable problem than we thought."

Still, viewing the investigators' video "hit me in the gut," said Stitzhal, who wants to see changes made.

Some elements of the budding electronics recycling industry have banded together as the International Association of Electronics Recyclers. The group offers certification for companies that abide by certain worker-safety and environmental standards and that can ensure that most of the material they receive is truly recycled instead of being dumped.

While about 500 companies and organizations in the United States have a part in the electronics recycling industry, only about 100 are members of the group, said John Powers, an IAER consultant.

"They get paid by companies to do the right thing," Powers said. "They get paid, frankly, for keeping companies' products and names out of the news. They don't want stuff with their logos on it ending up in rivers."

But that's exactly what the environmental activists found when they visited Guiyu in December.

Among the ownership tags the activists saw on electronic equipment in Guiyu were those of a Chicago bank, the Kentucky education department, a Minnesota small-business development center, the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Investigators documented children playing amid heaps of ash from burned electronic waste, unprotected workers brushing a suspected cancer-causing substance called carbon black from computer printer cartridges, laborers cracking open cathode ray tubes containing toxic lead and barium, and widespread burning of plastics that is almost certain to produce dioxins. They also found women whose work involved sitting by small fires, heating up computer circuit boards to melt the lead-and-tin solder, producing toxic fumes they could not help but inhale.

"Right now, we're creating Superfund sites in China, and they'll never have a Superfund to clean it up," Puckett said.

With the waterways of Giuyu polluted, the people there have taken to importing their water for drinking and cooking from more than 15 miles away, townspeople told the activists and Chinese journalists. Laborers make the equivalent of about $1.50 a day.

"For money, people have made a mess of this good farming village," a 60-year-old man told a Chinese journalist, according to a translation provided by the environmental groups. "Every day villagers inhale this dirty air, their bodies have become weak.

"Many people have developed respiratory and skin problems. Some people wash vegetables and dishes with the polluted water, and they get stomachache sickness."

In one image captured on the activists' videotape, a young boy kneels by a dark rivulet that flows past mounds of burned computer waste, clutching a partly eaten apple. In another, a barefoot child sits atop a pile of discarded printer cartridges, computer casings and other electronic junk.

And in Pakistan and India, a preliminary look by Asian environmental organizations turned up equally dangerous conditions, the groups reported.

In New Delhi, children are routinely employed to burn circuit boards, while in Karachi "circuit boards are desoldered with blow-torches with no ventilation fans. And acid operations take place indoors with less ventilation," the activists reported. Primitive smelting and acid-stripping operations take place in those countries, too, today's report says.

What are consumers to do?

"Right now we are left with very few moral, sustainable choices as to what to do with e-waste other than store it indefinitely" in the attic or basement, Puckett said.

Cullen Stephenson, who manages the Washington Department of Ecology's solid-waste program and represents the state on a national committee struggling with the question, agreed.

"There are several programs emerging, so unless it's doing some harm, let it stay in your basement for now," he said.

That is by and large what consumers have been doing. And because of that, industry officials said, the problem seems likely to mushroom in the next few years as consumers begin to dispose of their old computers, printers and so forth.

By one estimate, the number of electronics items to be recycled in the United States is projected to grow from about 12 million in 2000 to more than 25 million in 2005. Another estimated projected that 500 million pieces of electronic equipment would be discarded between 1997 and 2007 -- containing about 1.5 billion pounds of lead, 3 million pounds of cadmium and 632,000 pounds of mercury, according to today's report.

There are no current, reliable estimates about how much is exported for recycling, Stephenson said.

According to the activists, none should be. They point to the Basel convention, a 1989 international treaty that bans the export of hazardous waste from rich nations to poor nations. The United States signed the pact, but Congress' failure to ratify it left the United States the only developed country in that position. The only other signatories that have failed to ratify the treaty are Haiti and Afghanistan.

The U.S. government actually encourages exportation of electronics waste, although it does not condone the improper disposal documented in today's report.

"Clearly they're dumping a lot of crap into the land and air and water and probably people's lungs," said Bob Tonetti, a scientist in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Solid Waste. "It's somewhat disconcerting to hear this, and it needs to be changed. And it needs to be changed through international activities and agreements and education."

If the United States were to unilaterally stop exporting electronic waste, other nations still would send waste to China and other Asian countries from other nations, Tonetti said. Plus, the United States could not handle all of its own e-waste.

"If we didn't have export markets, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing here in terms of recycling," Tonetti said. "We need those export products."

Mark Small, vice president for environment, safety and health at Sony Electronics Inc., said electronics recycling produces only a small amount of the waste in Asia. Much more comes from the manufacturing of toys, clothing and other items, he said. "To be blunt, we need those low labor rates to get value out of products, so that you can go to Wal-Mart and buy a boombox for $30," Small said. Similarly, he said, electronics recycling relies on low Asian wages.

Small said considering that many electronics are produced in Asia, it's only fair that some of the recycling go on there, too.

"If we want a truly closed-loop system, we have to send them back to where they are manufactured," he said.

But Stitzhal, the local government consultant for Seattle and other cities, advocates expanding the recycling industry in the United States to provide jobs. Unemployed timber workers and others could benefit, he said.

One person trying to beef up the domestic industry is Seattle recycler Craig Lorch, co-owner of Total Reclaim in the South Park area. Lorch sends glass from cathode ray tubes to Pennsylvania for recycling. He explained that he could make more by sending them overseas; he would save a bundle on labor costs here, plus he would get paid for each tube.

Some materials don't have ready markets here, Lorch said. He sells them to brokers, who may well be sending the material overseas.

"We're trying to do the right thing by recycling the stuff," Lorch said. "But if the result of us keeping that stuff out of our landfills is that it goes to another country where it's improperly managed, what are we gaining?

"We're just poisoning someone else to benefit ourselves."

P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or robertmcclure@seattlepi.com