Recyclers sell toxic e-waste overseas

McClatchy Newspapers

SACRAMENTO, Calif.

In the soft morning light, the silver-gray mountain of electronic trash did not look especially hazardous. But it was.

Inside that massive rubble of technology, with its V-shaped canyons of printers and keyboards and its finlike ridges of fax machines and coffee makers, was enough toxic material — including lead, cadmium and brominated flame retardants — to poison California watersheds for centuries and sow disease in humans.

“This is the problem,” said Jim Taggart, president of ECS Refining in Santa Clara, Calif., where the e-waste was waiting to be safely recycled. “This is the material that most people are exporting. They’ll get paid 5 to 10 cents a pound for shoving it in a container and shipping it overseas.”

Five years after California launched an ambitious effort to control pollution from electronic waste, much of our e-waste is being shipped overseas, where it is contributing to a legacy of pollution and disease that would not be tolerated here, a McClatchy Newspapers investigation has found.

Domestically, California’s program is doing just what officials intended: It has outlawed e-waste from landfills and jump-started a multimillion-dollar state industry to recycle televisions, computer monitors and other video display devices, paid for with public money.

But there is a blind spot: The program provides no money for anything else, meaning large volumes of low-value, hazardous electronic waste that are difficult to recycle at a profit in California are instead being exported, a consequence the state did not anticipate. Much of it is flowing to developing nations, where it is picked apart by workers exposed to a high-tech cocktail of contamination.

“Most people just don’t know what’s happening to their material when it’s dropped off,” said Taggart, one of the state’s leading e-waste recyclers. “If they knew, they wouldn’t be dropping it off.”

Nearly all TVs and monitors are recycled — at least initially — in California. That is not true for the towering mountains of other electronic products sold in the state.

State records do not clearly reflect how much is exported, but industry officials put the number at 160 million to 210 million pounds a year. That is enough to fill more than 4,500 shipping containers which, placed end to end, would form a convoy about 35 miles long.

Little information about those exports reaches the public, though. Instead, Californians who donate electronics generally believe they are doing the right thing for the environment. And most do so amid a blizzard of eco-friendly claims from recyclers who in some cases have exported e-waste themselves.

“There is not an e-waste recycler out there who doesn’t try to look as green as possible,” said Janice Oldemeyer, president of Onsite Electronics Recycling in Stockton, Calif., and a recognized industry leader. “Yet the reality is most of them aren’t.”

In California, few recyclers tout their green credentials more prominently than John Shegerian, chairman of Electronics Recyclers International in Fresno, Calif., who has invested millions in environmental improvements over the past five years.

Shegerian told McClatchy Newspapers that e-waste exports are deplorable.

Yet documents show that as recently as 2008 even ERI was quietly selling large volumes of e-waste to a Los Angeles exporter who shipped it to Hong Kong. While legal, the sale violated a pledge the company signed with the nation’s leading e-waste watchdog group, the Basel Action Network.

“I’m not at all happy that this took place,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of the group.

The toxic trade is flourishing at the crossroads of two well-intended state actions: a first-in-the-nation law that has paid about $400 million to collect and recycle almost a billion pounds of monitors and TVs since 2005, and separate bureaucratic regulations that ban all electronic devices from landfills — not just video display devices.

As a result, roughly half of what turns up at collection events and recycling facilities — everything from Apple iPods to Xbox game consoles, popcorn makers to alarm clocks — has no value under the state recycling law and is up for grabs to dozens of brokers and other companies that compete aggressively for it.

“What do you do with millions and millions of pounds of hair dryers and toaster ovens and razors and vacuum cleaners?” said Bob Erie, chief executive officer of E-World Recyclers north of San Diego. “There are plenty of brokers who are buying that material and exporting it all to China.”

State officials are concerned but say their options are few, because e-waste exports, although controversial, are legal under federal law.

“This is where I think the federal government really needs to step up,” said Jeff Hunts, manager of the TV and monitor recycling program at CalRecycle. “If the federal government today said, ‘Electronic scrap shall not be exported without being treated to a certain level,’ that would grow, frankly, a domestic industry.”