May 6, 2009 11:14 am US/Pacific
State Recycling Laws Not Stopping Waste Exports
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ―
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California has become possibly the world's largest dumper of electronic waste.
CBS
As consumers get ready for the switch to digital television, experts predict a tsunami of old televisions will hit the waste stream.
With California's strict recycling laws, you might think not just televisions but all electronics would be carefully recycled.
But a CBS5 investigation found that's not the case; in fact the state has become possibly the world's largest dumper of electronic waste, or e-waste.
The pictures caused an uproar: the environmental nightmares in China caused by the dumping of the world's electronic waste. Children playing in the ash and workers breathing toxic fumes were some of the scenes brought to the Western world's attention several years back by the Basel Action Network (BAN).
"We saw everything there, anything that you can call e-waste, from stereos, fax machines, scanners, many, many printers", said BAN's Jim Puckett. "There are whole sections of these villages just dedicated to these printers."
Since then, states including California passed strict recycling laws to make sure that waste doesn't get dumped internationally or here at home.
But California's recycling law only pays recyclers to dispose of televisions and monitors. And along with those comes all the other "stuff" that consumers get rid of, like printers and faxes, even vacuum cleaners.
At some recycling facilities ECS Refining in Santa Clara, they've built huge shredders that can churn through virtually all electronics and produce saleable commodities at the end.
But most recyclers don't have that capability, according to ECS' Jim Taggart.
"Only 20 percent of it is processed here," said Taggart. "The other 80 percent is getting exported."
And where's it going? Puckett said the Basel Action Network's research shows much of the waste from the United States is shipped to Hong Kong.
"There's about 50 containers of e-waste arriving every day in Hong Kong," he said. "Once there, it's smuggled very quickly into the area of Guiyu in China. There's no recycling going on in Hong Kong."
CBS 5 wanted to know just how much of the electronic waste collected in California might actually be winding up in Hong Kong and potentially China.
We asked Barbara Kyle of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition to review copies of export documents recyclers are required to file with the state.
"A couple of things jump out at me. One is that out of the 67 registered recyclers in California, an awful lot of them don't have any notices at all, aren't filing notices," Kyle said. "An awful lot of the answers were pretty bare bones and incomplete."
But one thing is clear, according to those state documents, the place many California recyclers are sending those old electronics is Hong Kong.
"It just gets pushed down the chain to the poorest countries," Kyle said.
"So California, in essence, protected its own state very well, but it's winding up being dumped on someone else," we asked.
"Right," Kyle said.
"The California rule is doing nothing other than shunting this material offshore into other locations," Puckett said. "It is not helping the global environment. It may be helping the California environment, but it is certainly damaging the rest of the world."
BAN and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition are now lobbying Congress to strengthen federal e-waste export rules.
Note: In the video version of this story, Barbara Kyle was incorrectly identified as being with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition; she is with the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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