By Andrew McGlashen
Great Lakes Echo
Most college students don’t think about lead or mercury when they sit down at a computer. But in 2007, Michigan State University chucked more than 140,000 pounds — that’s about 50 Volkswagen Beetles —of used electronics.
Among the heaps of computers, printers and other unwanted machines were some 1,405 monitors containing, by a conservative estimate, 5,560 pounds of toxic lead that can seriously damage the nervous system, especially in children.
The electronics students use each day contain these and other toxic substances known to harm human health, and they have to go somewhere when their universities upgrades to the latest technology.
Environmental activists and government officials say much of the so-called e-waste is frequently and illegally exported to developing countries, where it’s often handled improperly, posing serious health risks and degrading the environment.
For instance, a 2007 study in China found that women living near an e-waste recycling site and the babies they breastfed had elevated levels of dioxins, chemical compounds linked to cancer and developmental defects.
E-waste consists largely of older computer monitors that use cathode ray tubes, CRTs for short, made of leaded glass. These contain an average of four to eight pounds of lead.
Newer monitors are typically liquid crystal display, or LCD, flat screens, which contain small amounts of mercury, a metal that can cause brain and kidney damage.
MSU sends its e-waste to Valley City Environmental Services, a Grand Rapids-based recycling company that prides itself on being environmentally friendly. Indeed, Valley City “has an excellent track record,” according to Reed Sneller of the Department of Environmental Quality’s Waste and Hazardous Materials Division.
While no evidence suggests that Michigan State’s e-waste is exported illegally, weak federal regulation makes it extremely difficult for citizens and institutions to be certain they aren’t part of the problem.
Valley City sends tubes containing lead and mercury from the university’s unwanted monitors to two large and reputable recycling companies in Wisconsin, where the metals are recovered and sold on the commodities market.
As LCDs replace older monitors, lead and other toxic substances, including cadmium and chemical flame retardants, are often discarded irresponsibly. In 2005 the United States generated 2.63 million tons of e-waste, only 12.5 percent of which was recycled, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Even among recyclers there is widespread illegal activity and disregard for EPA’s only e-waste regulation, which restricts the export of CRTs.
An online sting by federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) employees posing as foreign buyers found 43 American companies — most of which touted their environmental stewardship —that disregarded the rule and exported monitors illegally.
GAO, an investigatory arm of Congress, said the EPA has publicly named only one of the companies because they are under investigation.
“It’s an industry fraught with cheating,”said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the San Francisco-based Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which promotes responsible handling of e-waste.
And U.S. law does little to discourage such behavior, she said. “EPA doesn’t care. Our government doesn’t care.”
In an August 2008 report, the GAO said e-waste too often ends up in developing countries like China and India where it might be stored in landfills that aren’t designed to safely contain hazardous materials, or placed in acid baths to extract the valuable metals inside. Unsalvageable components are frequently burned in the open, releasing toxic pollution into the air.
In addition to sharply criticizing EPA’s lax enforcement, the report said other types of electronics “flow virtually unrestricted,” and agency representatives told the GAO they “have neither plans nor a timetable to develop an enforcement program.”
In 2006, EPA convened representatives from state governments, electronics manufacturers, non-profits, the recycling industry and others to establish guidelines for a program to certify responsible handlers of e-waste.
Kyle’s group joined the panel, but before long, it became apparent that industry representatives would be the chief decision-makers, she said. By September 2008, she’d had enough.
“We participated for a couple years and said, ‘This isn’t anything we can approve.’ So we withdrew.”
The result of the meetings is a program that misleads citizens, businesses and institutions that put faith in its validity, according to Kyle.
“They have this false sense that e-waste recyclers have been vetted,” she said. “It’s a low-bar standard masquerading as a high-bar standard.”
Kyle’s group has started a voluntary program with what she says are the highest standards in the country for e-waste recyclers. No Michigan companies have signed the agreement.
However, Michigan State made the right moves when choosing its electronics recycler, which enjoys a reputation in the industry for playing fair, according to the Department of Environmental Quality’s Sneller.
The university visited a handful of recycling facilities before making a decision, said Kris Jolley, manager of the university’s Surplus Store, and Valley City was the most professional and transparent about where it sends electronics components after they’re processed.
But if you ask Kyle, the burden of researching recyclers to find a responsible company shouldn’t fall to individuals and institutions trying to do the right thing.
“It would be great if there was a law that said they can’t do these bad things,”she said.