*[Enwl-eng] Electronic Waste Piling Up Across the US

[ENWLine]

*Unwanted Electronic Gear Rising in Toxic Piles*

Illustration Omitted:
Discarded televisions and computers in Philadelphia. Mark Makela
for The New York Times

By IAN URBINA
Published: March 18, 2013 157 Comments

Last year, two inspectors from California's hazardous waste agency were
visiting an electronics recycling company near Fresno for a routine
review of paperwork when they came across a warehouse the size of a
football field, packed with tens of thousands of old computer monitors
and televisions.

Illustration Omitted:
ON THE TRAIL Members of an environmental group worked with
researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to place
tracking devices in cathode ray tubes bound for American recycling
companies. Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The crumbling cardboard boxes, stacked in teetering rows, 9 feet high
and 14 feet deep, were so sprawling that the inspectors needed
cellphones to keep track of each other. The layer of broken glass on the
floor and the lead-laden dust in the air was so thick that the
inspectors soon left over safety concerns. Weeks later, the owner of the
recycling company disappeared, abandoning the waste, and leaving behind
a toxic hazard and a costly cleanup for the state and the warehouse's owner.

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like
those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big,
glassy funnels inside these machines --- known as cathode ray tubes, or
CRTs --- were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions
obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them
and creating what industry experts call a "glass tsunami" as stockpiles
of the useless material accumulate across the country.

The predicament has highlighted how small changes in the marketplace can
suddenly transform a product into a liability and demonstrates the
difficulties that federal and state environmental regulators face in
keeping up with these rapid shifts.

"Lots of smaller recyclers are in over their heads, and the risk that
they might abandon their stockpiles is very real," said Jason Linnell of
the Electronics Recycling Coordination Clearinghouse, an organization
that represents state environmental regulators, electronics
manufacturers and recyclers. In February, the group sent a letter to the
Environmental Protection Agency asking for immediate help dealing with
the rapidly growing stockpiles of the glass, much of which contains lead.

With so few buyers of the leaded glass from the old monitors and
televisions, recyclers have collected payments from states and
electronics companies to get rid of the old machines. A small number of
recyclers have developed new technology for cleaning the lead from the
tube glass, but the bulk of this waste is being stored, sent to
landfills or smelters, or disposed of in other ways that experts say are
environmentally destructive.

In 2004, recyclers were paid more than $200 a ton to provide glass from
these monitors for use in new cathode ray tubes. The same companies now
have to pay more than $200 a ton to get anyone to take the glass off
their hands.

So instead of recycling the waste, many recyclers have been storing
millions of the monitors in warehouses, according to industry officials
and experts. The practice is sometimes illegal since there are federal
limits on how long a company can house the tubes, which are
environmentally dangerous. Each one can include up to eight pounds of lead.

The scrap metal industry estimates that the amount of electronic waste
has more than doubled in the past five years.

A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United
States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and
monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But
now, there are only two plants in India doing this work.

In 2009, after television broadcasters turned off their analog signals
nationwide in favor of digital, millions of people threw away their old
televisions and replaced them with sleeker flat-screen models. Since
then, thousands of pounds of old televisions and other electronic waste
have been surreptitiously unloaded at landfills in Nevada and Ohio and
on roadsides in California and Maine.

Most experts say that the larger solution to the growing electronic
waste problem is for technology companies to design products that last
longer, use fewer toxic components and are more easily recycled. Much of
the industry, however, seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

Cathode ray tubes have been largely replaced by flat panels that use
fluorescent lights with highly toxic mercury in them, said Jim Puckett,
director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy group. Used
panel screens from LCD televisions and monitors, for example, do not
have much recycling value, so many recyclers are sending them to landfills.

State and federal environmental policies have also become victims of
their own success. Over the past decade, environmental regulators have
promoted "take-back" programs to persuade people to hand in the more
than 200 million old televisions and broken computer monitors that
Americans are thought to have stored away in closets, garages and basements.

The same programs have courted businesses to divert their electronic
waste away from landfills to avoid the hazardous chemicals in this toxic
trash from leaching into groundwater. More than 290,000 tons of the
high-tech castoffs are now directed away from landfills and toward
recyclers each year.

"The problem now is that the collection of this waste has never been
higher, but demand for the glass that comes from it has never been
lower," said Neil Peters-Michaud, the chief executive of Cascade Asset
Management, a recycling company.

Roughly 660 million pounds of the glass is being stored in warehouses
across the country, and it will cost $85 million to $360 million to
responsibly recycle it, according to a report released in December by
TransparentPlanet, an organization focused on electronic waste research.

The stockpiling problem is especially worrisome to electronics companies
and to state and federal officials since they might have to pick up part
of the tab if the stockpiles were abandoned and declared federal
Superfund sites.

At least 22 states have laws that make electronics manufacturers like
Sony, Toshiba and Apple financially responsible for recycling their old
products. But lack of oversight of these programs has led to rampant
fraud. In one tactic, quietly known in the industry as "paper
transactions," recyclers buy paperwork to indicate that they collected a
certain amount of electronic waste that they never actually collected.

The Obama administration, more than any of its predecessors, has
strengthened oversight of electronic waste. In 2012, the General
Services Administration enacted rules discouraging all agencies and
federal contractors from disposing of it in landfills. The federal
government, which is among the world's largest producer of electronic
waste, disposes more than 10,000 computers a week on average.

Federal agencies are failing to sufficiently track their electronic
waste, and large amounts of it are still being disposed of through
public or online auctions, according to a Government Accountability
Office report last year. In these auctions, the waste is often sold to a
first layer of contractors who promise to handle it appropriately, only
to have the most toxic portion subsequently sold to subcontractors who
move it around as they wish.

Some of this waste is dumped illegally in developing countries, the
G.A.O. found. Congress is considering legislation to ban certain types
of unprocessed and nonworking electronics and electronic waste from
being exported to developing countries from the United States.

Recyclers say there is still money to be made on processing the old
monitors and televisions if companies charge a price that more genuinely
reflects the expense of disposing of the glass properly. But practices
like "greenwashing," whereby companies pretend to engage in
environmentally responsible disposal practices, hinder such progress.

"They're skimming off the computers, cellphones and printers that can be
recycled profitably because they have more precious metals," said Karrie
Gibson, the chief executive of Vintage Tech Recyclers. "Then they
stockpile the CRTs, or dump it in landfills or abroad."

The sheer quantity of the glass accumulating at some recycling plants
has contributed to environmental and workplace safety problems. In Yuma,
Ariz., for example, Dlubak Glass, one of the country's largest recyclers
of glass from televisions and monitors, found itself overwhelmed.

When state regulators visited the site in 2009, they found a mountain of
the lead-rich glass, several stories tall. Dust from the shimmering
mound of recycled glass had contaminated the surrounding soil, including
a nearby orchard, with lead at 75 times the federal limit, according to
state documents.

"We have it entirely under control now," said Herb Schall, a Dlubak
plant manager.

In September, California passed an emergency measure allowing companies
to send monitors and televisions to hazardous landfills for the next two
years.

Charlotte Fadipe, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Toxic
Substances Control, said her office's investigation of the abandoned
warehouse near Fresno is continuing, and investigators are still trying
to locate Charles Li, the owner of the company, TRI Products.

Over the past four years, TRI has been paid more than $1 million by the
state to recycle electronic waste from local schools, hospitals and
federal agencies, including the F.B.I., the I.R.S. and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, according to state and company documents.

After a reporter found him to be running another electronic waste
disposal company, Mr. Li did not respond. But when he was contacted
online by another recycler and asked whether he was still looking to buy
electronic waste, he immediately replied yes, with one caveat.

"Right now, we can take PC, server, telephone, printer and household
e-waste," he wrote. "I cannot take your CRT/TV as e-waste because we
don't have equipment to recycle the tubes."



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/us/disposal-of-older-monitors-leaves-a-hazardous-trail.html?_r=0


*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed, without profit, for research and educational
purposes only. ***



From: "Yahoo Newsgroups" <vasi...@ramapo.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 3:12 PM
Subject: News: Electronic Waste Piling Up Across the US



------------- * ENWL * ------------
Ecological North West Line * St. Petersburg, Russia
Independent Environmental Net Service: http://www.bellona.ru/enwl/
Russian: ENWL(discussions), ENWL-inf(FSU information), ENWL-misc(any topics)
English: ENWL-eng (world information)
en...@lew.spb.org, enwl...@lew.spb.org, en...@lew.spb.org, en...@lew.spb.org
Subscription, Moderator: vf...@lew.spb.org or en...@enw.net.ru
Archive: http://enwl.bellona.ru/pipermail/
and http://groups.google.com/group/enwl/
SEE ALSO: http://www.bellona.org (English)and http://www.bellona.ru
(Russian)
RSS: http://groups.google.ru/group/enwl/feeds?hl=ru
(C) Please refer to exclusive articles of ENWL
-------------------------------------
ONLY if your address is subscribed:
Enwl-eng mailing list
Enwl...@enwl.bellona.ru
http://enwl.bellona.ru/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/enwl-eng