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

["PageRox" <PageRox93>]

WOW----Nigeria?!! I had NO idea!
Thanks, Dennis, for the info! What a scam!
Those poor kids!

XO-Glenna
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Dennis Moore
  To: Babel-list ; EternalCafe
  Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 11:32 AM
  Subject: [npc] What NOT to do with those old computers!!! Plz spread the
word.


  'Digital Dumps' Heap Hazards at Foreign Sites

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/11/AR200512110
0664.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/