Daniel D'Ambrosio
Hartford Advocate
Tuesday, May 20, 2008

In a vision out of Dante's Inferno, a Chinese man uses a sharpened wooden pole to stir a stew of circuit boards in a dozen or more red plastic buckets, melting the "skins" to mine the minute amounts of gold left behind.

Thick plumes of reddish-orange smoke rise lazily from the buckets as the worker, unprotected except for a pair of latex gloves, jokes with Michael Zhao, a Chinese-born University of California journalism student. Last year, Zhao traveled to his home country to film eDump, a 20-minute documentary about the "informal" electronics recycling industry in the town of Guiyu. The film served as his graduate thesis.

Known throughout the world as a dumping ground for so-called e-waste, Guiyu imports more than a million tons of obsolete computers, cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) and other electronics every year, mostly from the U.S. Dealing with this chaotic mountain of circuit boards, monitors and capacitors makes up 80 percent of the local economy. It replaced subsistence farming 20 years ago as the primary means of survival.

"Get away — you can't handle this, it's too choking," the man stirring the buckets says to Zhao. "You'll regret it if you're poisoned. Get going quick."

In the background is the sound of Zhao, in fact, choking. He asks the workers about their own safety. "Us? We've been disinfected, high-temperature disinfection," someone replies as a woman giggles.

After a couple of minutes, his eyes burning from the toxic fumes, Zhao takes the worker's advice and leaves.

"My eyes just couldn't function in that shack where they're getting gold out," Zhao told the Advocate in a recent interview. "My eyes burned really quickly. They probably had the same reaction in the first couple of weeks, then they just manage to say, ‘OK, I'm used to it. This is my job.'"

Zhao, 30, is still a Chinese citizen, but is living in New York, working as a multi-media producer for the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations.

While global warming has taken center stage in the world's environmental consciousness, another more immediate problem — what to do with our outdated computers — has already resulted in more than a billion pounds of lead entering the environment, along with millions of pounds of heavy metals and toxic elements, according to Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, based in San Jose, Calif. A typical trashed CRT, for example, contains some eight pounds of lead.

And like global warming, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation not to sign on to a United Nations-sponsored protocol, known as the Basel Convention, to prevent e-waste from being shipped by developed countries to developing countries.

"All 27 European Union countries have domestic laws that make it illegal to send hazardous waste to developing countries," said Sarah Westervelt of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, a nonprofit group working to push the U.S. toward addressing e-waste at the federal level.

Westervelt said the absence of federal legislation has resulted in a Wild West atmosphere that has left local officials around the country "scrambling to keep these toxic materials and heavy metals out of solid waste landfills."

Indeed, at a hearing last month, the Committee on Science and Technology in the House of Representatives (see sidebar) said that although 13 states have e-waste laws, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that "at most only 15 percent of products at the end of their useful lives reach a recycling or re-use program." According to the EPA, some two million tons of used electronics go to landfills or incinerators every year, but only 345,000 tons are recycled.

In Connecticut, environmentalists celebrated when an e-waste law passed last year. But the bill has not yet become law, and was delayed this year by tweaks that modify how television manufacturers are charged to support the program.

"We held off on moving proposed regulations to the Regulations Review Committee of the legislature for approval, as is required," said Dennis Schain of the state Department of Environmental Protection. "We knew there was movement for minor adjustments in the legislature and wanted to make sure regulations are in sync with any of this. We will now swing back into action." Zhao's documentary film shows an environment in Guiyu that appears to be irretrievably lost to pollution — water turned the color of soy sauce, river banks comprised almost entirely of discarded circuit boards, air thick with toxic fumes from burning plastic insulation off copper wire and melting tin from circuit boards atop coal-fired stoves. "Guiyu has been a trash town for decades. You can smell it before arrival," says Zhao in his film. "Everywhere you can see both signs of wealth and chaotic piles of junk. Nearly 20 years of dealing with scrapped electronics have turned ditches black. The air is permeated with burned plastics and baked circuitry." Chinese health authorities found that among 165 children tested in Guiyu, 82 percent had levels of lead in their blood of more than 100 micrograms per one liter, the EPA threshold for lead poisoning, according to Zhao.

A world away, in Windsor, Conn., Intechra, one of the leading electronics recyclers in the country, has built a squeaky-clean 80,000-square-foot facility to take in the computers, printers and PDAs of Fortune 1000 companies from around the country, including most of the big names in Hartford.

Plant manager Kevin Lindsay admits to a friendly rivalry with Intechra's two other recycling plants, in Columbus, Ohio, and Dallas, both of which are much bigger; 145,000 square feet in Dallas and 300,000 square feet in Columbus.

Lindsay's crew of 85 workers is going through an average of 48,000 computers monthly, with 75 percent of those coming from "all over Connecticut." He wants to hit the plant's current limit of 50,000 units every month so he can expand.

"We are very competitive internally," said Lindsay. "We would like a bigger building."

Except for a relatively narrow front office, and a segregated computer lab where repairs are made, the Intechra plant is one vast space, with a receiving dock on one end and computer-laden floor-to-ceiling storage shelving like that in a Home Depot or Costco, at the other.

Security is tight, with everyone coming into the warehouse passing through a security cage manned by two guards, and 37 motion-activated cameras — 32 inside and five outside — monitoring everything that goes on. That's because the computers that come into the building are loaded with sensitive data like credit card numbers that must be kept secure until it's wiped clean from the hard drives; not to mention hundreds of laptops that could be slipped out of the building.

The process begins with loaded pallets rolling along wheeled rails embedded in the floor to receivers manning stations resembling grocery store check-outs where the computers and other products are entered into Intechra's internal tracking system. Clients can follow along on their own computers as their equipment is processed. Next, it's on to the computer techs who wipe the hard drives clean using a process that meets Department of Defense standards, and check the CPUs for hard drives that might not show up on their diagnostic software, and "soft media" like CD-ROMs and floppy disks. That's where a lot of sensitive data can be inadvertently left.

"You'd be surprised, people forget," said Production Manager Peter Johnson. "Believe it or not there's more risk associated with soft media than the computers themselves."

The goal is to resell as much of the equipment as possible, and Intechra even goes so far as to make repairs where feasible. But inevitably, some of the machines find their way back to the EOL (End of Life) area, the last stop in the expansive, high-ceilinged space.

Stripped down to their metal frames, the machines are scrapped out for their copper and power supplies and more, but there's a limit to what Intechra can handle, such as the lead-loaded CRTs.

"We don't touch any toxic stuff," said Lindsay. "We're going to send them to a vendor."

Rike Sandlin, Intechra's director of marketing in Jackson, said the company has a team of people who go "downstream," including to countries in Southeast Asia, to make sure those vendors handle things properly. He said unequivocally that nothing Intechra takes in ends up in Guiyu, "or any developing country," as e-waste for the informal recycling business.

"We actually audit the companies we send materials to," said Sandlin. "A lot stays in the U.S., some goes to Asia and other developing nations that need the raw materials."

The EPA, in fact, makes the argument that obsolete electronics are actually a vital source of raw materials and cheap computers for developing nations.

"A great deal of this is not waste at all; that is, it is whole equipment or components for reuse," said EPA Spokesman Dale Kemery. "This reuse avails many people in developing countries with information technology that would otherwise be unaffordable for them."

While acknowledging there are instances of unsafe recycling practices in some parts of the world — think Guiyu — the EPA insists that "most e-waste exports are dealt with properly." Not only that, says Kemery, but without foreign markets for the plastics and metals processed for raw material from electronics in the U.S. (essentially by shredding), many of the efforts to "divert obsolete electronics away from disposal and toward reuse and recycling could not be sustained."

That's because the U.S. has no smelters or refiners that can convert copper and precious metal from electronics materials into metals pure enough for use. The closest one is in Quebec. Neither do we have any CRT glass furnaces in the entire Western Hemisphere, according to the EPA, to make recycled CRT glass. And finally, says Kemery, nearly all markets for recycled plastics from electronics are in Asia.

While the U.S. declined to sign on to the Basel Convention, Kemery says the EPA supports it and is working on draft legislation that would allow the U.S. to ratify and implement the Convention. And finally, says Kemery, the EPA is involved in an international effort called the StEP initiative, to "promote sound reuse and safe recycling, especially concerning the trans-boundary flows of electronics."

Whether you choose to focus on the hellish images from Guiyu, or the neat and orderly work flow of the Intechra plant in Windsor and the assurances of the EPA, however, one thing is certain: the vast majority of used electronics is ending up in landfills, and it's only expected to get worse with next year's conversion to digital television.

Millions of television sets with "untold tons of lead" are headed to landfills, said Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) in his opening statement for last month's congressional hearing. Gordon mused that if engineers had known the problem they were creating by using lead to shield television viewers from x-rays, they might have come up with something better, a sentiment echoed by Zhao.

"A lot of people watch my film and say ‘I never thought about this problem. I never imagined my computer would become something so dangerous to people in other countries,'" Zhao said. "I hope the computer makers will try really hard to find substitute materials to replace those toxic ones. That's the real solution, but it's a long, long way off."

You can view Zhao's documentary, eDump, at michaelzhao.net.

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