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By Scott Miller, King 5 News

SEATTLE, Washington, 25 February 2002  -- King County has an active program encouraging residents and businesses to recycle computers because computers contain hazardous waste, such as lead and other heavy metals.

Recycling them keeps that waste out of our landfills, but there is shocking evidence that our recycled computers are polluting the environment anyway ­ on the other side of the Pacific.

If you look inside an Auburn warehouse, you’ll find stacks of computers ­ castoffs from schools in Shoreline and Puyallup, and businesses like Nordstrom and Boeing.

They pay Gary Wivag and Larry Wallace to recycle this stuff. About 30 percent of the companies want to know what happens to the stuff, according to Wivag.

Like most recyclers, Wivag and Wallace resell these old computers in bulk ­ two-thirds of them are shipped to Asia.

Total Reclaim is the region’s largest recycler of computer monitors. The leaded glass goes to a plant in Pennsylvania, but the guts of the monitor go into another container and the wires go in yet another.

"When you sell a box of wire, you probably don't know exactly where its going to go,” said one recycler.

Environmental activist Jim Puckett says he has a pretty good idea where the wads of wires and mountains of motherboards wind up.

"Industry insiders say 80 percent of the material is exported, and 90 percent of that material goes to China. Has anybody ever bothered to look at China and see what's happening there? We did and what we found was rather appalling,” he said.

In December, Puckett traveled to a town in China about 4 hours from Hong Kong. He shot a video of computer recycling ­ stacks of hardware arriving by truck, by tractor, even by bicycle.

Puckett saw American computers parceled into huge piles and stripped by hand for every usable bit of plastic or metal ­ painstaking handwork that only pays off because labor in China is so cheap.

"For the most part, they are making about $1.50 a day. That's why this waste is going to China,” he said.

The work is different from village to village. He showed one village where their entire livelihood came from burning the tiny wires from the computers. Puckett found a mountain of wires which were sorted by day and burned by night to remove the plastic insulation.

Children walk barefoot through the ash ­ ash that is laden with dioxins.

Puckett says burning is often the preferred method for removing unwanted plastics from computer parts, releasing toxic compounds into the air that drift around the planet.

"This is modern day gold-mining ­ a very polluting, very dirty operation,” he said. In another village he found chips sitting in plastic tubs of acid ­ a cheap way to salvage small bits of gold.

Acid fumes rise into the air. Workers tend the tubs without respiratory protection. The sludge and the slurry spill onto the river bank.

"All of this acid is going into the river or the banks along the river. It’s just completely dumped,” he said.

Elsewhere along the river, he found computer junk that will never be recycled ­ and old irrigation ditch full of broken monitor glass that is laden with lead.

It’s the picture of computer recycling Puckett wants to show the world.

KING 5 asked how representative this is.

“We don't,” said Puckett. “What we do know is this is the first time anybody's gone to look. And this is what we saw.”

Seattle monitor recycler Craig Lorch watched Puckett’s video.

“It’s very disturbing,” said Lorch. “We as an industry and we as a country need to recognize that that is a representative sample of what might be done with our material."

Recycler Larry Wallace, who runs the warehouse in Auburn, watched the video, too.

"I think it would be very unfair to lump everyone together,” he said.

Wallace stopped shipping to China a few months ago and still believes his buyers handle computers responsibly, but he’s never been to Asia to check.

"I feel comfortable with what we're doing with it. Because otherwise if we weren't doing it, that would wind up in a landfill,” said Wallace.

Puckett says that might be better than what he saw in China. KING 5 asked him if, based on what he saw, it would be better for people not to recycle their computers at all.

"Consumers have to resort to their closets and garages until the manufacturers will really take responsibility for this problem,” he said

Puckett doesn’t blame local recyclers for what he found. He blames big corporations like Compaq, Gateway and Dell ­ the companies that manufacture computers.

Puckett believes those companies need to build computers that contain fewer hazardous materials and they and need to take responsibility for what happens to computers after they become obsolete.

The Electronic Industry Association declined KING 5’s request for an interview but said in a statement that the industry has no control over where recycled computers go.

The report "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia" was produced by the Basel Action Network.