BY JIM GREEN
The Australian Conservation Foundation argued in its 2000 Blueprint for a Sustainable Australia, "The digital revolution is merely the first taste of a complete industrial revolution, a sustainability revolution".
The ACF did not have much else to say about this "revolution", but we can sketch out the parameters nonetheless. The benefits of the digital revolution are taken as given — such as the internet, the ability to take your work home to make your boss even richer, and so on.
As for the "sustainability revolution", a growing computer recycling industry means that fewer old computers are going to become landfill or incinerated. Recycling of computers, estimated to be growing at 18% annually, is being promoted by widespread bans on the dumping or incineration of old computers. Export of old computers to Third World countries is creating jobs in the recycling industry, and is helping to bridge the North-South "digital divide".
Too good to be true? I'm afraid so. The realpolitik of the "new" digital economy is every bit as irrational, exploitative and environmentally unsustainable as the "old" economy.
A report released in February by two US-based organisations, the Basel Action Network and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, provides a sobering reality-check.
The report, Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, reveals that huge quantities of hazardous "e-wastes" (such as computer monitors, circuit boards, printers and mobile phones, which contain lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants and many other toxic chemicals) are being exported for recycling to China, Pakistan and India. The recycling of these components is extremely harmful to human health and the environment.
E-waste
Exporting Harm states: "Just beneath the glamourous surface of the benefits and the wealth created by the information technology revolution looms a darker reality. Vast resource consumption and waste generation are increasing at alarming rates. The electronics industry is the world's largest and fastest growing manufacturing industry, and as a consequence of this growth, combined with rapid product obsolescence, discarded electronics or e-waste, is now the fastest growing waste stream in the industrialised world."
Third World countries are targeted for these recycling industries — which in the West are prohibited by public pressure and regulations — for familiar reasons: low labour costs; lax environmental protection and occupational health and safety regulations are not well enforced.
Exporting Harm focuses on the Guiyu area in Guangdong province, China, where about 100,000 poor migrant workers are employed to breaking apart and process obsolete computers imported primarily from North America. Men, women and children work under appalling conditions, unaware of the health and environmental hazards involved.
Many tonnes of e-waste are being dumped along rivers, in open fields and beside irrigation canals in the rice-growing Guiyu area. Already, well water is no longer drinkable and water has to be trucked in from 30 kilometres away.
The Basel Action Network (BAN) found extraordinary levels of contaminants in Guiyu: river sediment samples had lead levels 212 times higher than liquid that would be treated as hazardous waste in the Netherlands; barium at levels in the soil were almost 10 times higher than the threshold for environmental risk in the US; tin levels were 152 times the US threshold; and chromium in one sample was at levels 1338 times the US threshold.
The BAN's preliminary investigation of the situation in India and Pakistan revealed conditions even worse than those found in China. In Pakistan, circuit boards are de-soldered with blow-torches with no ventilation fans and acid operations take place indoors with less ventilation. In India, the report noted, open burning of circuit boards in the middle of New Delhi neighbourhoods is routine. The employment of child labour is widespread.
Poor people in the Third World are forced to choose between more poison or more poverty. Exporting Harm states: "E-waste exports to Asia are motivated entirely by brute global economics. Market forces, if left unregulated, dictate that toxic waste will always run 'downhill' on an economic path of least resistance. If left unchecked, the toxic effluent of the affluent will flood towards the world's poorest countries where labour is cheap, and occupational and environmental protections are inadequate. A free trade in hazardous wastes leaves the poorer peoples of the world with an untenable choice between poverty and poison - a choice that nobody should have to make."
Sold a green pup
Clearly, the green gloss of "recycling" doesn't match the reality. Consumers are being sold a green pup: "Manufacturers refuse to eliminate hazardous materials or design for disassembly. Second, government policies fail to hold manufacturers responsible for end-of-life management of their products. Thus, finally, consumers, are the unwitting recipients of a toxic product abandoned by those with the greatest ability to prevent problems. Left with few choices, consumers readily will turn to recycling. But it appears that too often, this apparent solution simply results in more problems, particularly when the wastes are toxic."
The BAN and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition are calling for the problem to be dealt with "upstream" though legislation forces the electronics industry to:
- initiate "take-back" recycling programs for computers and other electronic equipment;
- phase-out of toxic products in electronic products: and
- improve designs to ensure equipment has a long life, is upgradeable and can be safely and easily recycled.
These demands feed off one another, for example, computer manufacturers required to take back their products will have a much greater incentive to improve the design of their products. Conversely, as Exporting Harm notes, the "escape valve" of Third World dumping exacerbates the problem.
Computer manufacturers fiercely resist calls for take-back programs or the phase-out of toxic chemicals, and little improvement has been made even in the case of measures that hardly impact on corporate profits, such as designing computers for easy disassembly.
Yet only upstream solutions are sufficient. Recycling dangerous products, dumping as landfill, incineration and disposal in the Third-World are all dangerous and environmentally unacceptable.
Exporting Harm argues: "While there are efforts to divert e-waste from landfills, via 'recycling', electronics 'recycling' is a misleading characterisation of many disparate practices — including de-manufacturing, dismantling, shredding, burning, exporting etc — that is mostly unregulated and often creates additional hazards itself. 'Recycling' of hazardous wastes, even under the best of circumstances, has little environmental benefit, it simply moves the hazards into secondary products that eventually have to be disposed of.
"Unless the goal is to redesign the product to use non-hazardous materials, such recycling is a false solution. Current market conditions and manufacturing methods and inputs discourage environmentally sound electronic recycling practices, so most e-waste that is currently being 'recycled' is actually being exported, dismantled in prisons or shredded in processes where there is some material recovery followed by the discard of the remaining materials."
Planned obsolescence
Computer manufacturers use various means to encourage consumers to replace computers at frequent intervals, such as limiting the supply of spare parts or making new products incompatible with old ones (or with competitors' products). This is fantastic for profits, but it greatly adds to the toxic waste stream.
Exporting Harm states: "Due to the extreme rates of obsolescence, e-waste produces much higher volumes of waste in comparison to other consumer goods. Where once consumers purchased a stereo console or television set with the expectation that it would last for a decade or more, the increasingly rapid evolution of technology combined with rapid product obsolescence has rendered everything disposable. Consumers now rarely take broken electronics to a repair shop as replacement is now often easier and cheaper than repair. The average lifespan of a computer has shrunk from four or five years to two years. Part of this rapid obsolescence is the result of a rapidly evolving technology. But it is also clear that such obsolescence and the throw-away ethic results in a massive increase in corporate profits, particularly when the electronics industry does not have to bear the financial burden of downstream costs."
While e-waste dumped in the Third World is sourced from many countries. the US is the largest single source. The US government is by far the most irresponsible. The US is the only developed country in the world not to have ratified the Basel Convention on Hazardous Wastes, a United Nations treaty banning the export of hazardous wastes from developed countries to developing countries.
Moreover, a string of exemptions have been added to US legislation to encourage the dumping of e-waste in the Third World. These exemptions are explained away with the excuse that the material is destined for recycling, not dumping.
Exporting Harm states: "The current US policy of encouraging the quick and dirty route of export, hidden under the green cloak of the word 'recycling', is not only an affront to environmental justice but also to the principles of producer responsibility, clean production and pollution prevention."
Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia is available at <http://www.ban.org> and <http://www.svtc.org>. A documentary film has also been produced and is available from the organisations.
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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