Jim Puckett Executive Director, Basel Action Network (BAN)

In the Guiyu city area, ground-zero of the e-waste trade in China, every view is filled with piles of e-waste and workers hunched over fires where circuit boards are cooked to melt the solders to remove chips. Then the chips are soaked in acid baths which are then flushed into the river ways to extract tiny fractions of gold. Wires and components are burned in fireplaces. And all of this is done by thousands of unprotected men, women and children, former farmers, unaware of the dangers that lurk in the toxic electronic detritus. The air is filled with the stench of solder vapors, and of burning plastics and wires. The streams were black rivers full of toxic ash.

Woman in Guiyu, China, about to smash a cathode ray tube from a computer monitor, to remove the copper yoke at the end of the funnel. The glass is laden with lead, but the biggest hazard from this is the inhalation of the highly toxic phosphor dust coating inside of the CRT. ©Basel Action Network 2001

Our first trip resulted in BAN’s video documentary Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia and spurred our creating the Electronics Recycler’s Pledge of True Stewardship. The Pledge had three major planks—zero export, zero prison labor and zero landfill or incineration. It established a clear “line in the sand” for environmentally responsible recycling. Our film raised awareness and concern, and our Pledge channeled that awareness in a positive direction.

The Pledge is still the only such program of its kind, but it is limited by what we, as a small organization, were able to do. It relies on “desk” audits conducted over the phone and not a more rigorous program of independent site audits conducted under the auspices of accredited certifying bodies. Three years ago, we began to make plans to move the Pledge into just such a program.  However, we suspended those efforts when a U.S. EPA-funded program for national certification of recyclers was announced.

Our hope was that the EPA would support appropriate standards with credible auditing. Although we knew the EPA program, known as R2, was not likely to go as far as we would like on the issue of prison labor and dumping in landfills, we were hopeful that it would at least agree to respect the laws of importing countries and thus seriously deter the massive e-waste trade to developing countries. We worked diligently in the multi-stakeholder negotiations on this basis only to see that, in the end, the export provisions were a veritable swiss cheese of loopholes. BAN and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) walked out of the process in protest after the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) pressed for export exemptions and the EPA went along with these. The R2 standard is far too weak to seriously address the e-waste crisis and control the unsustainable flood of our growing e-waste tide. BAN and ETBC have prepared long and short critiques of the R2 program, as well as a scammer’s guide on how to export e-waste while adhering to its rules. This background is available here.

So six years after BAN first exposed the cyber-age nightmare, little has changed. The inadequacy of our government’s efforts was highlighted recently when the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) took the EPA to task for failing to enforce the few existing export rules that exist for Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) from computer monitors and TVs. Through just a simple sting operation, the GAO report easily found 43 U.S. recyclers violating the CRT regulations and reported that these companies are blatantly lying to their customers about their environmental credentials. BusinessWeek used information from the GAO report as the basis for an excellent in-depth investigation of one of these recyclers in the story E-Waste: The Dirty Secret of Recycling Electronics.

And in May of this year, I had the opportunity to travel back to Guiyu – this time with a crew from 60 Minutes. We were literally attacked by the local “bosses,” gangs used to control the workers, to prevent our showing the world the horrors that lay around every corner of this sprawling global e-junkyard. We were threatened and physically assaulted as they forcibly snatched the soil sample I was taking. Our camera crew had to fight to prevent the cameras from being taken and smashed. Watch the 60 Minutes report here.

It was a scary situation, but seeing how bad conditions had gotten in Guiyu since my last visit was even worse. The volume of e-waste has grown significantly in the past six years, and almost all of it was coming from the U.S. and Canada. The very dangerous operations of burning, cooking and acid stripping had proliferated many fold. Workers complained to us of being beaten if they talked to journalists, or complained about conditions. A professor from Shantou Medical College very recently tested the blood of 165 children between 1 and 6 years old in Guiyu. Eighty-two percent had lead levels of more than 100 micrograms per deciliter. Ten micrograms per deciliter is considered an “acceptable” level of lead in the blood, but recent research has revealed that even levels below 10 have a negative impact on a child’s IQ.

And all of this allowed by our unwillingness to do what the rest of the developed countries of the world have done – and simply ban this type of hazardous waste exportation. Enough is enough.

BAN is diligently working on two fronts to ensure that another six years does not elapse with nothing being done. First, we are actively pursuing with the ETBC federal legislation to prohibit export of toxic e-waste to developing countries. Secondly, we are ramping up the market-based solution we have created, the e-Stewards Initiative, which builds on and expands the Recycler’s Pledge. This initiative has four components:

• Standards: Based on discussions with industry leaders, state governments and concerned enterprises, BAN has developed new standards that not only ban export, prison labor and dumping of toxic e-waste, but include strict data security measures, occupational safety and health and techniques for holding downstream recyclers accountable for compliance.
• Certification: The e-Stewards standards will be supported by an accredited independent certification program that includes on-site audits by trained auditors.
• Commitment: Major consumers of electronic recycling services, such as Fortune 1000 companies, will be invited to participate in the program by committing to using only certified e-Steward recyclers and asset recovery companies.
• Education and Promotion: A proactive media campaign will continue to raise awareness of the harm being caused by e-waste and the critical role the certification program can play in curbing this environmental disaster.

In the U.S., technology is improving the quality of our lives at the very time our unwillingness to deal responsibly with that technology at end of life is destroying the environment and poisoning people in developing countries. We simply cannot allow that win-lose proposition to continue, when a win-win future is in our grasp.

But it will take more than lip service to address this crisis. It will take both new legislation and a comprehensive program of rigorous standards that are supported by large consumers of recycling services and enforced by credible, third-party audits – the e-Stewards Initiative. We are calling on all recyclers to join Redemtech and more than 30 other companies to become e-Steward Recyclers. And we are also calling on Fortune 500 companies, universities and school districts, city and state governments, and other large organizations to become an e-Stewards Enterprise and sign a commitment that they will make exclusive use of e-Steward recyclers.

I hope I can count on your support in making this critical program a success.

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