GROUP EXPOSES AMERICA'S DIRTY TECH SECRET

By Henry Norr, San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO, California, 25 February 2002  -- Amid terrorism, war, recession and Enron, I can sympathize if you feel you don't have much bandwidth left over to worry about e-waste -- the millions of tons of unwanted PCs, monitors, TVs, phones and other toxic-laden electronic gear piling up in garages, closets and warehouses across the country and around the world.

But like it or not, the issue is too big, too concrete and potentially too dangerous to stay under the rug much longer. And people who have come to understand the stakes -- not just environmental activists, but also a fast- growing band of state and local officials -- aren't going to let us leave it there.

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

A report scheduled for release today provides devastating evidence of a phenomenon that has long been suspected but never before documented: Huge quantities of scrap electronics from the United States wind up in impoverished regions of Asia, where valued material is extracted by primitive methods that are highly dangerous to the health of the workers involved and to the environment.

Titled "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia," the report will be published jointly by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition of San Jose (on whose site, www.svtc.org, it should be posted) and by the Basel Action Network, a global group, based in Seattle, that seeks limits on international trade in toxic material.

Major contributions to the report were also made by three nongovernmental organizations in Asia: Greenpeace China, Toxics Link India, and SCOPE (Society for Conservation and Protection of the Environment) of Pakistan.

Skeptics looking at that list may well suspect bias or exaggeration in the report, but they will have a hard time explaining away the evidence the authors provide: not just eyewitness accounts, but numerous photographs -- and, coming soon, a video -- illustrating what they describe.

Among the pictures: Chinese women, wearing no protective gear at all, tending coal-fired grills used to melt lead solder from circuit boards; others breaking open lead-laced CRTs with hammers; nitric and hydrochloric acids being heated, giving off huge clouds of acrid gases, and then used to extract bits of gold from computer chips, finally producing sludge that is dumped in rivers and irrigation ditches; villages covered in black ash from nightly fires, where cables covered with plastics and dangerous brominated flame retardants are burned so the copper wire inside can be recovered; and so on.

As the report puts it, we're talking about 19th century methods used to clean up the wastes of 21st century technology.

The investigators who visited these sites weren't there long enough to do any serious study of the health effects of these practices, but they did bring back some evidence of the resulting environmental devastation.

In Guiyu, a complex of villages in China's Guangdong Province that has been transformed since 1995 from a rice-growing community into a center for electronics reprocessing, groundwater pollution is so bad that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 30 kilometers away.

Ground samples collected in the area by the environmentalists and analyzed later in Hong Kong revealed concentrations of heavy metals that were hundreds of times higher than allowed by guidelines from the World Health Organization or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S. government actually signed the 1989 Basel Convention, a treaty that limits and regulates international trade in toxic material, but we are one of only three signatories that has not ratified the agreement. The other two: Haiti and Afghanistan. (I am not making this up! See www.basel.int/ratif/ratif.html#conratif.)

In particular, our government -- starting with the Clinton administration -- has adamantly opposed a 1994 amendment that banned the export of hazardous wastes from rich to poor countries. The amendment, known as the Basel Ban, isn't yet legally binding, but most developed countries, including the European Union, have agreed to honor it. Not us, though.

YOU CALL THAT RECYCLING?

One of the ironies in all this is that the equipment in question apparently gets to Asia by way of "recyclers" here at home.

Among the variety of organizations that claim that label, none of the nonprofits and only a few commercial operators are actually capable of recycling all of the equipment they collect, in the sense of finding a new home for it or reducing it to reusable materials.

Most of them simply remove selected items -- either complete products that are relatively modern and still in demand, or else readily salvageable components such as memory modules.

What's left they sell for pennies a pound to wholesale brokers, who may extract some additional items but ultimately ship the remains to places like the Philippines, Singapore or Dubai. There, apparently, it's sold yet again to Asian companies, which then take it to villages like Guiyu or to the slums of Delhi, Karachi and other cities.

In other words, sad to say, even if you make a good-faith effort to get your unwanted hardware recycled, you may be contributing to the problem.

S.F. CLEANUP, MISSOURI MESS

A similar sorry conclusion emerges from another recent expose, this one involving not Asia but a little town in the American heartland. Herculaneum, Mo., 30 miles south of St. Louis, has for more than 100 years been the home of the nation's largest lead smelter, now called the Doe Run Co. (The same company just got permission from the Bush administration to drill for lead in the state's Mark Twain National Forest.)

Doe run calls itself "a leader in environmental safety," and by some measures, it has made significant progress in reducing toxic emissions from its Herculaneum facility in recent years.

It has even been "voluntarily" replacing contaminated soil from playgrounds, school yards and backyards in the town since 1991. (See www.doerun.com/ENGLISH/html/the_environment.htm for the company's side of this story.)

But the operation remains well out of compliance with federal emission standards, and last year, when state officials got around to testing children in the community of 2,800, they found that more than one in four had blood lead levels exceeding legal limits.

Just last week, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, tests on the yards of 90 homes showed that in spite of the company's cleanup efforts, lead levels had increased an average of 600 parts per million during the past year; the federal standard for the maximum safe lead level where children play is a total of 400 parts per million.

Now the EPA is offering to put up many of these families in motels while their homes and yards are cleaned again, and both federal and state authorities are threatening to close the plant if it doesn't soon get emissions down to legal levels.

On CNN, Paula Zahn recently observed that "We haven't seen anything quite like this since Love Canal." That's an exaggeration, but she's on to something.

But what does it have to do with us in the Bay Area? The story caught my eye when it began to break a month or two back because I remembered that Doe Run is where HMR USA, the Australian company that runs the only monitor- recycling facility in San Francisco, sends the leaded glass that emerges from its CRT crusher.

Now, all the evidence I know of suggests that HMR is on the side of the angels. It enjoys a good reputation among environmentalists, and its crusher, for which the city contributed almost half the cost, is said to be state of the art. On the whole, we're lucky to have such a facility nearby -- few communities in the United States have any way of dealing responsibly with old TVs and monitors.

And yet it's almost certain that some of that lead poisoning the children of Herculaneum comes from screens turned in by San Franciscans trying to do the right thing.

TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY

Everybody knows that electronic equipment gets obsolete sooner or later -- usually sooner. But as a society, we've mostly kept our heads in the sand about its disposition after it's no longer useful. That has to change: We need to plan ahead for a problem there's no avoiding.

That means more effort and investment in reducing our use of toxic material.

It means creating the infrastructure necessary to deal safely and responsibly with all the products we use -- here at home, not in some faraway land where we can hope that desperately poor people will take care of the messes we've made. And it means building the costs of all this into the prices we pay for our gear.

Japan and the European Union are already moving in this direction, with recently enacted laws that set goals for phasing out toxic materials and that require manufacturers to take responsibility, one way or another, for the products they sell.

Two bills introduced in the state Senate last week point in those directions. SB1523, introduced by Sen. Byron "Bottle Bill" Sher, D-Palo Alto, would require consumers to pay an "advance disposal fee" when they purchase any electronic device with a CRT. The funds would then be distributed to local governments, nonprofit agencies and others who handle recycled electronics.

SB1619, sponsored by the nonprofit Californians Against Waste and introduced by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Rosemead, is much broader in scope, applying not just to CRTs but to all "hazardous electronic devices" -- which is to say, virtually all high-tech devices.

Romero's bill would require manufacturers either to implement take-back programs or to pay an "advance recovery fee" on every product they sell. It would set numerical targets for recovery and recycling of products, and if those targets weren't met, a deposit system would be imposed.

You can check out both bills for yourself at www.leginfo.ca.gov. I have lots of questions about them, and I'm sure the industry will have objections and alternatives to offer, some of which might make some sense, when hearings begin in about six weeks.

But compared with what's happening today in Asia, in Herculaneum, and at plenty of places in between, these bills sure sound like a promising new beginning to me.

· ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle Page E - 1