Earth Day frenzy raises hardware recycling questions

On a day when companies are promoting their green efforts as part of Earth Day, a nonprofit has accused some organizations of causing more environmental damage in the name of recycling electronic equipment.

Companies that do recycling are collecting used products such as cell phones and exporting them to developing countries where heavy metals and hazardous waste from the devices are poisoning poor communities, said Sarah Westervelt, the electronic waste project coordinator for Basel Action Network (BAN), a part of the nonprofit group Earth Economics.

BAN gets its name from the Basel Convention, an international treaty signed in 1989 to control and prevent the international trade of hazardous waste.

[ Learn more about energy-saving, waste-reducing initiatives from the winners of InfoWorld’s first annual Green 15 award. ]

Last week BAN attacked junk collection company 1-800-GOT-JUNK for not offering a guarantee that its free electronic waste collection program wouldn’t result in toxic materials being exported to developing countries. The company held a free recycling event on April 19 at 67 locations in the U.S. and Canada.

The event was an effort to raise awareness about 1-800-GOT-JUNK’s services, said Tania Hall, a company spokeswoman. 1-800-GOT-JUNK is not a recycling company; its main mission is to help customers reclaim space by collecting junk and putting it in landfills, Hall said. The company offers the service at more than 340 locations in the U.S. and Canada itself and through franchisees.

BAN proposed that 1-800-GOT-JUNK’s franchisees and recycling brokers sign a contract certifying they don’t export hazardous materials, but its overtures were rejected, Westervelt said. BAN also asked 1-800-GOT-JUNK to tell its franchisees to remove from events recyclers such as Second Life Computers, in Pennsylvania, which exports “non-working equipment” to Malaysia.

While it couldn’t fully comply with BAN’s requests, 1-800-GOT-JUNK told its partners to avoid sending recycled equipment with toxic material overseas, Hall said. Some partners obliged, removing recyclers mentioned by BAN.

The events had already been organized when BAN approached them, Hall said. “We could not drop everything and do what BAN asked us to do,” Hall said.

The company could not simply cave in to all of BAN’s demands, and it did the right thing, Hall said. However, BAN disagreed.

“Yes, they appeared to make a token effort to address concerns about exports … but 1-800-GOT-JUNK failed to set adequate standards for all their recyclers and didn’t perform adequate due diligence,” Westervelt said.

BAN took a heavy-handed approach and launched a media campaign to smear the company’s name, according to Hall. The nonprofit could have gone after companies causing more damage to the environment, she said.

BAN didn’t specifically target 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Westervelt said. A few recycling companies in the U.S. contacted BAN with concerns that recycling events would funnel toxic material into export. “It was clear their expertise is in hauling garbage to the landfills, not in the international trade in toxic wastes. That’s why we offered to work with them, to quickly get them up to speed on these issues so they could ensure they weren’t contributing to the export of U.S. e-waste,” Westervelt said.

Despite its rough approach, organizations such as BAN can help promote responsible recycling, Hall said.

BAN is working with companies including Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell to avoid the export of toxic waste. It is also trying to get the U.S. government to ratify the Basel Convention. About 170 countries have ratified it, but the U.S. is not one of them, Westervelt said.

The failure to ratify the Convention has made the U.S. one of the largest toxic waste traders, Westervelt said. The U.S. openly permits the trading of used electronics and circuit boards with toxic materials under the pretext of equipment reuse, Westervelt said. But in many cases, the gear is not reused and developing countries don’t have the tools to properly recycle it. For example, three-quarters of the recycled electronic equipment that arrives in Nigeria is junk, Westervelt said. “It’s so obsolete nobody wants to buy it, so they have to burn it,” she said. This releases toxic substances including dioxins, Westervelt said.