[npc] What NOT to do with those old computers!!! Plz spread the word.

[Dennis Moore <clayboy56>]

'Digital Dumps' Heap Hazards at Foreign Sites

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/11/AR2005121100664.html

By Elizabeth Grossman
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, December 12, 2005; Page A07

Each month, hundreds of thousands of used computers, televisions and
other electronic components -- about 500 container loads -- arrive in
Nigeria.

Some of them were donated by people who thought they were helping
satisfy the rapidly growing appetite for modern technology in a
developing country where few can afford it. And some of them came from
individuals or organizations that simply wanted to get rid of their
obsolete equipment at the lowest cost.

Either way, at least half of the used equipment that arrives in Lagos
by the ton is unusable and ends up in landfills, a Seattle-based
nonprofit discovered recently after sending a team to survey the
situation. The Basel Action Network (BAN) found that much of the
junked equipment is adding to the considerable hazardous waste
problems of a country that lacks facilities to properly handle it.

"There's an amazing expertise in repair, but so much of what's coming
in is worthless that it is just dumped," said BAN's executive
director, Jim Puckett. Photos taken by the group show enormous piles
of junked electronics in wetlands, along roadsides, and burning in
uncontained landfills that are routinely set ablaze to reduce bulk.
These open dumps are often in cities and in residential neighborhoods.
The pictures show children wandering near smoldering piles of computer
and television parts.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that 20 million to 50
million tons of electronics are discarded each year. Less than 10
percent of the discards get recycled, and half or more end up
overseas, much exported for inexpensive, often unsafe and
environmentally unsound recycling, primarily in China and India.

What is different about the exports to Africa, said Puckett, is that
unusable equipment sent under the guise of recycling is also being
trashed.

"We saw some kids taking copper off equipment in the dumps, and we
were told some people were collecting circuit boards, but we saw no
organized materials recovery at all," he said. Most major electronics
manufacturers have take-back and recycling programs, but those efforts
have yet to extend in a meaningful way to developing markets such as
Nigeria, which has no electronics-recycling facilities.

Intact computer equipment is not hazardous, but when computer and
television screens, circuit boards, batteries, and other high-tech
electronics are broken up or burned or degrade, they release toxic
materials that include lead, cadmium, barium, mercury and chromium.
Plastic components contain brominated flame retardants that accumulate
in human blood and fat tissue and can disrupt the body's hormonal
balance. When burned, some of these plastics release dioxins and
furans, persistent pollutants linked to a host of health problems,
including cancer.

Reuse advocates such as Jim Lynch of San Francisco-based CompuMentor,
which provides technology assistance to nonprofits, believe that
extending the life of a computer by putting it into the reuse market
is an environmentally sound solution. But many of the electronics that
BAN members saw in and around the Ikeja "Computer Village" in Lagos
were shipped by what Puckett called "waste cowboys acting as e-scrap
brokers." Both said there are legitimate nonprofits that arrange
donations of tested, working equipment to qualifying recipients, but
much of the unusable equipment dumped in Lagos comes in with the large
lots of used electronics imported as commercial resale.

"I call it environmental doom for the developing country and economic
boom for the unscrupulous traders," said Oladele Osibanjo of the
University of Ibadan, who was interviewed for BAN's recently released
report, "The Digital Dump."

Most of the equipment sold for reuse by the thousands of electronics
dealers in the Ikeja Computer Village, which has been dubbed the
Silicon Valley of Lagos, comes from abroad, from the United States,
Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Among the computers BAN saw for sale and stockpiled were many that
originally belonged to government agencies, businesses, schools and
hospitals in the United States, Europe, Japan and Israel, all bearing
original identification tags.

The United States, unlike the European Union and Japan, has no
government-mandated system for recycling used electronics -- and no
regulations to prevent the export of high-tech equipment for
environmentally unsound recycling.

The United States also remains the only developed country that has not
ratified the Basel Convention, a treaty designed to control
international trade in hazardous waste. "This makes the U.S. a haven
for a renegade scrap trade," Lynch said.

"It's a shadowy industry, and there's a lot more scrap than working
computers," said Robert Houghton, president of Redemtech Inc. in
Columbus, Ohio, which handles electronics recycling for Fortune 500
companies.

U.S. regulations allow export of used electronics and parts destined
for reuse or recycling, but "unfortunately our government does nothing
to distinguish between true reuse and the abuse of dumping on our
global neighbors," Puckett said.

"It's extremely difficult to peel back the onion far enough to find
out where the equipment goes. It may change hands two, three or four
times before it leaves the country," Houghton said.

The lack of tracking of disposed material also raises data security
issues. The Basel group purchased disk drives in Ikeja's Computer
Village and had them analyzed by the Swiss firm NetMon. Among those
that were readable were hard drives that belonged to the Wisconsin
Department of Health and Family Services and the World Bank.

Typically, U.S. government agencies dispose of used electronics
through surplus property offices. Equipment that cannot be used by
other agencies and is not part of a donation program is sold at public
auctions, most now conducted online.

Some buyers want the equipment for personal or small-business use, but
much is bought by brokers or auctioneers who resell for reuse, parts
or scrap value.

The General Services Administration, which handles these sales for the
federal government, has a record of its buyers but does not follow up.

Many local governments and private businesses use private electronics
recyclers, numbering in the hundreds. Numerous surplus property
managers interviewed said they did not know what the recyclers did
with the equipment; a number of recyclers declined to say or were
vague about where they send the electronics they collect for
processing or resale.

"Africa needs its own local industry, to be able to evolve its own
local computers, to meet its own local need," Shina Badaru, editor of
Nigeria's Technology Times, told BAN. "Africa does not need the used
equipment coming in from the north to pose long-term threats to our
environment."

But until substantial changes are made in materials used in
electronics and how used equipment is handled, the bridge across the
digital divide will ultimately lead, Puckett said, "to a digital
dump."

For more information about the BASEL CONVENTION: http://www.ban.org/