November 12th, 2008
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
As disheartening as it is to hear, you may not be doing anybody any good by taking broken electronics to a firm promising to recycle it. In fact, your good-faith act could be leading to disease and hellish pollution in some of the world’s most impoverished villages.
As a 60 Minutes exposé broadcast this weekend shows, many of the companies claiming to handle e-waste using appropriate techniques are actually shipping vast quantities to China, where a gang-controlled, illegal industry strips precious metals from it and leaves the toxins behind.
The centerpiece of that story, Colorado’s Executive Recycling, was caught red-handed; they’ve issued a denial, and tout their EPA certification on their web site, but as the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently reported, “EPA’s enforcement is lacking” and “EPA officials said they have neither pla ns nor a timetable to develop an enforcement program.”
While we’re waiting for the feds to enforce the law, a third-party effort has emerged to instill some measure of faith in e-waste recycling. Announced yesterday, the e-Stewards certification project is a joint effort between commercial recyclers (such as Electronic Recyclers International) and activist groups like the Basel Action Network, which was founded to “confront the issues of environmental justice at a macro level, preventing disproportionate and unsustainable dumping of the world’s toxic waste and pollution on our global village’s poorest residents.”
The project, according to its founders, “will be the continent’s first independently audited and accredited electronic waste recycler certification program. It will forbid the dumping of toxic e-waste in developing countries, local landfills and incinerators; the use of prison labor to process e-waste; and the unauthorized release of private data contained in discarded computers.”
Under this initiative, independent auditors will be enlisted to verify that member companies adhere to the BAN pledge of responsible practices. (Download this brochure to see how the e-Steward standard stacks up against two prominent alternatives.) The latest list of e-Steward member companies across North America is here; consumers wanting to know if a local recycling drive is legit can find out the name of the company running it and look them up.
Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media
