8 ms·

The dark side of electronic waste recycling

136 points by elorant 7y ago

howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
Not defending Total Reclaim's misrepresentation BUT.... the market for many recyclable commodities is insufficient to justify processing expense in the US. Why? Two reasons. First, there's little manufacturing capacity remaining in North America to utilize many (not all) recyclable commodities. Second, subsidies and currency manipulation continue to dump virgin commodities and new products into the US. This is not a consumer demand problem. It is not a US regulatory problem. It's no longer the fault of US product designers. The decisions that drive this environmental and safety disaster are made in Shenzen and Beijing, period. The US cannot legislate how China manufactures its products, nor how they are recycled in China. US consumers and recyclers now have nowhere else to go for supply or end-of-life solutions. Those of us who have warned about this dystopian reality were laughed at, gaslighted and ignored for the past 20 years. It's going to get worse. Electronic waste today. Civil rights tomorrow. Don't believe me? Here's a couple youtube videos featuring real experts on the issue. The future is bleak. Hudson Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws Chris Balding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk
- Accujack 7y ago
  There's no for-profit motive to justify recycling of much, that's true. However, recycling can still work well if there's money built in to the price of items for recycling what they're made of. In other words, a surcharge built into the cost of e.g. a flatscreen monitor for recycling is held in escrow during the device's lifetime. When it's end of life, the company that recycles it can claim that charge as part of its fee for ensuring the materials are not improperly disposed of. This sort of system would also have the benefit of encouraging purchase of more recyclable items by making the less recyclable ones more expensive. Of course, there are a thousand ways this system could be subverted... and the real problem in the US is a corrupt government that won't create laws to stop export of e-waste.
  - howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
    There is no way the CCP is going to legislate that into reality. There is no way the US Congress is going to further handicap American industry with what then amounts to another subsidy to China. It's not a solution. Nor is barring e-waste exports a solution. That material will end up in landfill. Terrible idea.
    - baxtr 7y ago
      What is a solution then?
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      An extra fee on imported goods isn't a subsidy, it's a tarrif.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      >There is no way the CCP is going to legislate that into reality. Not the CCP, the US government. That's why I mentioned the corruption of it being a problem. E-waste from the US should be kept in the US where we can ensure it's recycled properly, not shipped overseas to make a quick buck. China's lack of regulation and pollution is another problem entirely.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    This is exactly it. There's no reason we need to be held hostage to China's lack of environmental concern. When a device is imported from China or manufactured domestically, a fee is tacked on that includes the price of recycling processing. Congress just has to pass a law, period. Then recycling companies demonstrate responsible recycling and recover the fees. Fees are set per-product in order to ensure they are ultimately profitable. Resulting pure compounds, proven to not require further recycling processing bad for the environment, can then be re-exported to China for use in manufacturing at market rates. But as you say, it depends on Congress and on actual regulation and inspections/audits with teeth and meaningful penalties. To actually work, auditable photographic/video evidence of the entire workflow accounting for every single shipment would be a first step. But Congress depends on voters, so it's really up to us to force politicians to campaign on it.
- moreorless 7y ago
  HAHA!! "We can only place an order with you if you can do it at this price." Let's not kid ourselves here. We here in the West are every bit as guilty.
- the_cat_kittles 7y ago
  just wrong in general, but if were being specific about total reclaims case, you are suuuuper wrong because they were highly profitable, and despite the hilarious math flub at the end, he is still correct in noting that they would have taken home many millions processing the waste correctly.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  What a bizarre claim, of course the US can legislate how China manufactures and ships it's products in or out of the nation. There are all sorts of US Customs regulations for all sorts of products moving across our borders. From interception of counterfeit goods, to illegal substances there are a lot of activities for regulation of products. Wether we have the will to impose such conditions for recycling improvements is questionable though.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  When I recycle electronics they charge me some fiat currency up-front so you'd be right that I expect the service I've paid for. About to recycle some electronics from my employer who thought it would be acceptable to dump this stuff on the local Goodwill who can't afford to pay to recycle things they can't re-sell.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  Step one: offshore labor-intensive and polluting production to a developing country. Step two: blame them for pollution and producing cheaply.
- UserIsUnused 7y ago
  At least EU is advancing with the requirement for domestic big electronics to have 10year warranty.
blacksmith_tb 7y ago
For a gritty SF version of Guiyu e-waste recycling, check out Waste Tide[1], plot is a little convoluted, but it's certainly got lots of atmosphere. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste-tide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste-tide
hateful 7y ago
Can someone summarize what they did? Just when I think the article is going to tell me - it breaks into the life story of some guy from Seattle.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Claimed to be recycling e-waste safely in the USA. Actually shipped it to China, where workers handle mercury with no safety equipment and breathe in the burnt plastics.
- whydoyoucare 7y ago
  Agreed! The sheer size of the article lost me in the first few paragraphs. But go over the pictures, they tell most of the story.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  A well-thought-of Seattle recycling firm created a fake paper trail for toxic e-waste which covered up what they were really up to. 'Conspiracy to defraud'. They were caught by environmental activist surveillance. They got slap-on-the-wrist sentences (28 months, down from 20 years). They're still in business. The video. (10 minutes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4 The BasilActionNetwork's website, where you (and corporations, governments, and institutions) can track your IT disposals. https://www.eartheye.org/ https://www.eartheye.org/
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I am convinced that most of the outsourcing from the developed world to the less developed world is done to arbitrage regulations in how workers are treated, how they are paid, or how toxic byproducts are handled.
spencey 7y ago
Back in 2009 my family member was a partial owner of an electronics recycling facility in northern California. I worked in warehouse at times and I can tell you from experience that everything was incinerated or recycled. They had huge deals at the time with Apple and Lucent. Part of the deal was that all the precious metals that were recovered were given back to the companies for manufacturing. Most surprising thing for me was that the cost of insurance was one of the most expensive things on the books because of the amount of precious metals they had on hand at any given time.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Also, the big manufacturers do NOT want you to re-use what they made. They'd much prefer it all get melted down and make their new equipment inputs much cheaper.
ljm 7y ago
> Total Reclaim grew into a fixture in the community, and in the process, Puckett and Lorch grew close. Puckett says he took Lorch’s advice on issues, brought Total Reclaim into internal meetings, and if a reporter interested in e-waste dropped in, he’d offer them Total Reclaim as an example of how to do e-waste recycling the right way. This sounds like an example of being a poor regulator and then being captured by it. A regulator or an entity holding businesses to account should have no involvement in promoting or marketing their industry's best/favoured product. Pockett fucked up by trusting this business instead of bolstering the local regulatory framework. So he promoted a monopoly on ethical recycling with his 'friend''s firm instead of pushing to legislate. And then he acts upset because this business acted in favour of money and not his personal ethics. Separation of Corp and State should be equally as vital and constitutional as separation of Church and State.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  They're not a regulator, though. They're an advocacy group. He "acts upset" because they committed criminal fraud, not because they were just greedy.
walrus01 7y ago
There is a lot more detail about this and its aftermath available from other sources. Google "total reclaim Seattle".
shrubble 7y ago
I can tell that even 10 years ago LCD panels were worth very little to recyclers. I used to be involved in part time electronic recycling. How you could make millions in profit on 8 million lbs of LCD panels is mystifying to me.
8bitsrule 7y ago
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
destitude 7y ago
Shouldn't one of the solutions be for manufacturers to make the products easier to recycle to begin with and/or use safer materials in the construction? Even at a higher level I think it would help if we had e-products that end-users could repair easier. Apple touts how environmental they are but then make it nearly impossible to do something as simple as replace a battery in a Macbook for instance.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Its corporate green washing. Companies know that customers generally feel some amount of guilt over the products they purchase due to the environmental impact of them so they get the marketing teams to find some way to ease that guilt without actually doing much at all. Recycling has mostly been a global scale PR move to make people think they can buy as much product as they want and its ok because it gets turned in to new products after. What most people don't understand is while many things can be recycled, most things aren't. And most of the time recycling is actually downcycling. The product gets turned in to a lower form of material and after that its garbage. Its also a method to turn the blame around. Environmental damage isn't the corporations fault. Its your fault for not recycling enough even though the recycling centers have just shipped it off to the 3rd world to be burned.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Producers and consumers are equal partners on pollution. If consumers don't want to buy polluting products they must stop, by self-control or by passing laws.
    - clarry 7y ago
      It would be a start if people had an easy way of comparing the pollution caused by each product when they're shopping. Like they can compare calories or fat in food, or the energy efficiency of light bulbs. Of course, if such a system were in place, it wouldn't be a big leap from there to slapping extra tax on each item depending on the amount of pollution.
dbtx 7y ago
PBS video buried in the article: https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries-circuit/ https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries-circuit/ This reminds me of one I saw quite some time ago: The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan's Poorest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA) IMO it would be nice to have better circumstances for more Dr. Frankensteins putting more working machines together from scrap. That means big-name equipment and semiconductor manufacturers need to be more open with their tech specs and datasheets and obsolete firmware sources and so on, especially for parts and protocols that aren't even used in "current" machines-- instead of trade secrets in black boxes being the only reason working electronic bits are no longer usable. Then we can give more "weak" frankenputers to more poor kids and more 3rd world countries, in theory. edit: Last year I replaced an entire SMPS & CCFL backlight driver PCB from a TV that stopped turning on. I'm not terribly good at diagnosing SMPSs but I found a chip that was getting power and not giving power, so I looked around for a replacement-- and it's not available. Its design was found to be infringing on some other semiconductor giant's patent, so places like DigiKey and Mouser were not legally allowed to sell it any longer. But hey, I can get the whole board on eBay for <$50, so who cares? I care that there's this whole 99.5% perfectly functional board with a dozen now-useless FETs and some nice HV transformers-- and the final 0.5% was strictly a legal matter, an artificial obstacle. Well, presumably. I can't even find out for sure that I was correct to even want to replace it-- I can't even prove that replacing it doesn't help (OK, I could have borrowed the good one from the working board, which I should not even have needed to buy, but I'd rather have it just keep working). All together, that is annoying.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  Did you try TaoBao or AliExpress? Sometimes you can get ICs there which major western resellers don't carry for one reason or another, although it can be a bit closer to eBay than Digikey.
  - dbtx 7y ago
    No, it never occurred to me, so I'll have to check. It'd be nice to resell a refurbished board to someone, someday... at least the connectors are all labeled, so testing it is still possible without the TV. Thanks for the tip.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
The long term solution is using excess energy from renewables to incinerate, capture, and separate elemental components. There is never going to be a way to make transistors repairable or separable.
ptah 7y ago
>Ideally, he explains, electronics could be easily broken apart and recycled. this should be addressed with regulations. it is obvious regulating downstream is not effective
ChrisArchitect 7y ago
related/recent article from the Times: The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thailand-southeast-asia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thaila...

136 points by elorant 7y ago

Not defending Total Reclaim's misrepresentation BUT.... the market for many recyclable commodities is insufficient to justify processing expense in the US. Why? Two reasons. First, there's little manufacturing capacity remaining in North America to utilize many (not all) recyclable commodities. Second, subsidies and currency manipulation continue to dump virgin commodities and new products into the US. This is not a consumer demand problem. It is not a US regulatory problem. It's no longer the fault of US product designers. The decisions that drive this environmental and safety disaster are made in Shenzen and Beijing, period. The US cannot legislate how China manufactures its products, nor how they are recycled in China. US consumers and recyclers now have nowhere else to go for supply or end-of-life solutions. Those of us who have warned about this dystopian reality were laughed at, gaslighted and ignored for the past 20 years. It's going to get worse. Electronic waste today. Civil rights tomorrow. Don't believe me? Here's a couple youtube videos featuring real experts on the issue. The future is bleak. Hudson Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws Chris Balding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk

Accujack 7y ago
There's no for-profit motive to justify recycling of much, that's true. However, recycling can still work well if there's money built in to the price of items for recycling what they're made of. In other words, a surcharge built into the cost of e.g. a flatscreen monitor for recycling is held in escrow during the device's lifetime. When it's end of life, the company that recycles it can claim that charge as part of its fee for ensuring the materials are not improperly disposed of. This sort of system would also have the benefit of encouraging purchase of more recyclable items by making the less recyclable ones more expensive. Of course, there are a thousand ways this system could be subverted... and the real problem in the US is a corrupt government that won't create laws to stop export of e-waste.
- howmayiannoyyou 7y ago
  There is no way the CCP is going to legislate that into reality. There is no way the US Congress is going to further handicap American industry with what then amounts to another subsidy to China. It's not a solution. Nor is barring e-waste exports a solution. That material will end up in landfill. Terrible idea.
  - baxtr 7y ago
    What is a solution then?
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    An extra fee on imported goods isn't a subsidy, it's a tarrif.
  - Accujack 7y ago
    >There is no way the CCP is going to legislate that into reality. Not the CCP, the US government. That's why I mentioned the corruption of it being a problem. E-waste from the US should be kept in the US where we can ensure it's recycled properly, not shipped overseas to make a quick buck. China's lack of regulation and pollution is another problem entirely.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  This is exactly it. There's no reason we need to be held hostage to China's lack of environmental concern. When a device is imported from China or manufactured domestically, a fee is tacked on that includes the price of recycling processing. Congress just has to pass a law, period. Then recycling companies demonstrate responsible recycling and recover the fees. Fees are set per-product in order to ensure they are ultimately profitable. Resulting pure compounds, proven to not require further recycling processing bad for the environment, can then be re-exported to China for use in manufacturing at market rates. But as you say, it depends on Congress and on actual regulation and inspections/audits with teeth and meaningful penalties. To actually work, auditable photographic/video evidence of the entire workflow accounting for every single shipment would be a first step. But Congress depends on voters, so it's really up to us to force politicians to campaign on it.
moreorless 7y ago
HAHA!! "We can only place an order with you if you can do it at this price." Let's not kid ourselves here. We here in the West are every bit as guilty.
the_cat_kittles 7y ago
just wrong in general, but if were being specific about total reclaims case, you are suuuuper wrong because they were highly profitable, and despite the hilarious math flub at the end, he is still correct in noting that they would have taken home many millions processing the waste correctly.
dv_dt 7y ago
What a bizarre claim, of course the US can legislate how China manufactures and ships it's products in or out of the nation. There are all sorts of US Customs regulations for all sorts of products moving across our borders. From interception of counterfeit goods, to illegal substances there are a lot of activities for regulation of products. Wether we have the will to impose such conditions for recycling improvements is questionable though.
wavefunction 7y ago
When I recycle electronics they charge me some fiat currency up-front so you'd be right that I expect the service I've paid for. About to recycle some electronics from my employer who thought it would be acceptable to dump this stuff on the local Goodwill who can't afford to pay to recycle things they can't re-sell.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
Step one: offshore labor-intensive and polluting production to a developing country. Step two: blame them for pollution and producing cheaply.
UserIsUnused 7y ago
At least EU is advancing with the requirement for domestic big electronics to have 10year warranty.

blacksmith_tb 7y ago

For a gritty SF version of Guiyu e-waste recycling, check out Waste Tide[1], plot is a little convoluted, but it's certainly got lots of atmosphere. 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste-tide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste-tide

hateful 7y ago

Can someone summarize what they did? Just when I think the article is going to tell me - it breaks into the life story of some guy from Seattle.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Claimed to be recycling e-waste safely in the USA. Actually shipped it to China, where workers handle mercury with no safety equipment and breathe in the burnt plastics.
whydoyoucare 7y ago
Agreed! The sheer size of the article lost me in the first few paragraphs. But go over the pictures, they tell most of the story.
8bitsrule 7y ago
A well-thought-of Seattle recycling firm created a fake paper trail for toxic e-waste which covered up what they were really up to. 'Conspiracy to defraud'. They were caught by environmental activist surveillance. They got slap-on-the-wrist sentences (28 months, down from 20 years). They're still in business. The video. (10 minutes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4 The BasilActionNetwork's website, where you (and corporations, governments, and institutions) can track your IT disposals. https://www.eartheye.org/ https://www.eartheye.org/

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

I am convinced that most of the outsourcing from the developed world to the less developed world is done to arbitrage regulations in how workers are treated, how they are paid, or how toxic byproducts are handled.

spencey 7y ago

Back in 2009 my family member was a partial owner of an electronics recycling facility in northern California. I worked in warehouse at times and I can tell you from experience that everything was incinerated or recycled. They had huge deals at the time with Apple and Lucent. Part of the deal was that all the precious metals that were recovered were given back to the companies for manufacturing. Most surprising thing for me was that the cost of insurance was one of the most expensive things on the books because of the amount of precious metals they had on hand at any given time.

Scoundreller 7y ago
Also, the big manufacturers do NOT want you to re-use what they made. They'd much prefer it all get melted down and make their new equipment inputs much cheaper.

ljm 7y ago

> Total Reclaim grew into a fixture in the community, and in the process, Puckett and Lorch grew close. Puckett says he took Lorch’s advice on issues, brought Total Reclaim into internal meetings, and if a reporter interested in e-waste dropped in, he’d offer them Total Reclaim as an example of how to do e-waste recycling the right way. This sounds like an example of being a poor regulator and then being captured by it. A regulator or an entity holding businesses to account should have no involvement in promoting or marketing their industry's best/favoured product. Pockett fucked up by trusting this business instead of bolstering the local regulatory framework. So he promoted a monopoly on ethical recycling with his 'friend''s firm instead of pushing to legislate. And then he acts upset because this business acted in favour of money and not his personal ethics. Separation of Corp and State should be equally as vital and constitutional as separation of Church and State.

ceejayoz 7y ago
They're not a regulator, though. They're an advocacy group. He "acts upset" because they committed criminal fraud, not because they were just greedy.

walrus01 7y ago

There is a lot more detail about this and its aftermath available from other sources. Google "total reclaim Seattle".

shrubble 7y ago

I can tell that even 10 years ago LCD panels were worth very little to recyclers. I used to be involved in part time electronic recycling. How you could make millions in profit on 8 million lbs of LCD panels is mystifying to me.

8bitsrule 7y ago

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

destitude 7y ago

Shouldn't one of the solutions be for manufacturers to make the products easier to recycle to begin with and/or use safer materials in the construction? Even at a higher level I think it would help if we had e-products that end-users could repair easier. Apple touts how environmental they are but then make it nearly impossible to do something as simple as replace a battery in a Macbook for instance.

baroffoos 7y ago
Its corporate green washing. Companies know that customers generally feel some amount of guilt over the products they purchase due to the environmental impact of them so they get the marketing teams to find some way to ease that guilt without actually doing much at all. Recycling has mostly been a global scale PR move to make people think they can buy as much product as they want and its ok because it gets turned in to new products after. What most people don't understand is while many things can be recycled, most things aren't. And most of the time recycling is actually downcycling. The product gets turned in to a lower form of material and after that its garbage. Its also a method to turn the blame around. Environmental damage isn't the corporations fault. Its your fault for not recycling enough even though the recycling centers have just shipped it off to the 3rd world to be burned.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Producers and consumers are equal partners on pollution. If consumers don't want to buy polluting products they must stop, by self-control or by passing laws.
  - clarry 7y ago
    It would be a start if people had an easy way of comparing the pollution caused by each product when they're shopping. Like they can compare calories or fat in food, or the energy efficiency of light bulbs. Of course, if such a system were in place, it wouldn't be a big leap from there to slapping extra tax on each item depending on the amount of pollution.

dbtx 7y ago

PBS video buried in the article: https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries-circuit/ https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries-circuit/ This reminds me of one I saw quite some time ago: The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan's Poorest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA) IMO it would be nice to have better circumstances for more Dr. Frankensteins putting more working machines together from scrap. That means big-name equipment and semiconductor manufacturers need to be more open with their tech specs and datasheets and obsolete firmware sources and so on, especially for parts and protocols that aren't even used in "current" machines-- instead of trade secrets in black boxes being the only reason working electronic bits are no longer usable. Then we can give more "weak" frankenputers to more poor kids and more 3rd world countries, in theory. edit: Last year I replaced an entire SMPS & CCFL backlight driver PCB from a TV that stopped turning on. I'm not terribly good at diagnosing SMPSs but I found a chip that was getting power and not giving power, so I looked around for a replacement-- and it's not available. Its design was found to be infringing on some other semiconductor giant's patent, so places like DigiKey and Mouser were not legally allowed to sell it any longer. But hey, I can get the whole board on eBay for <$50, so who cares? I care that there's this whole 99.5% perfectly functional board with a dozen now-useless FETs and some nice HV transformers-- and the final 0.5% was strictly a legal matter, an artificial obstacle. Well, presumably. I can't even find out for sure that I was correct to even want to replace it-- I can't even prove that replacing it doesn't help (OK, I could have borrowed the good one from the working board, which I should not even have needed to buy, but I'd rather have it just keep working). All together, that is annoying.

leggomylibro 7y ago
Did you try TaoBao or AliExpress? Sometimes you can get ICs there which major western resellers don't carry for one reason or another, although it can be a bit closer to eBay than Digikey.
- dbtx 7y ago
  No, it never occurred to me, so I'll have to check. It'd be nice to resell a refurbished board to someone, someday... at least the connectors are all labeled, so testing it is still possible without the TV. Thanks for the tip.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

The long term solution is using excess energy from renewables to incinerate, capture, and separate elemental components. There is never going to be a way to make transistors repairable or separable.

ptah 7y ago

>Ideally, he explains, electronics could be easily broken apart and recycled. this should be addressed with regulations. it is obvious regulating downstream is not effective

ChrisArchitect 7y ago

related/recent article from the Times: The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thailand-southeast-asia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thaila...