Every
year, Americans toss
out as much as 4.5 million tons of old mobile phones, laptops, televisions,
Xboxes and other electronic gadgets.
Some
is recycled; some is repaired and refurbished for reuse; and some is thrown
into landfills or incinerators. Almost none of it, however, is “dumped”
overseas.
That,
at least, is the conclusion of the first comprehensive survey of what happens to U.S. e-waste after it is dropped into a recycling
bin. Published in February, the study by the U.S. International Trade
Commission surveyed 5,200 businesses involved in the e-waste industry
(companies that received the survey were required by law to complete it, and to
do so accurately), and found that almost 83 percent of what was put into
American recycling bins in 2011 was repaired, dismantled or recycled
domestically.
According
to the same survey, only 0.13 percent of the 4.4 million tons of e-waste that
Americans generated in 2011 was sent overseas for “final disposal” -- a term
that explicitly excludes recycling and reuse -- with an additional 3 percent
sent abroad for “unknown” purposes.
Reality
is a far cry from the long-standing claim, first made by the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based nongovernmental
organization in 2002, that as much as 80 percent of U.S. e-waste is exported to the developing world.
Amazingly, even with the wide currency the claimhas enjoyed over the years among environmental
organizations and the media, it was never
based on a systematic study.
Misguided Efforts
This
misunderstanding has led to several efforts at erecting partial export bans on U.S. electronics to developing
countries, which -- other studies demonstrate -- import them as cheap and
sustainable alternatives to new equipment. As a result, perfectly usable
electronics are diverted into a recycling stream, where they are turned into
raw materials, rather than into markets where they can be reused for years.
There
are no statistics on how many used gadgets were exported from the U.S. to the
developing world in 2002. Nor, for that matter, can anyone say for sure what
happened to those gadgets. No doubt, many were broken down in developing-world
facilities, where low-technology and often-hazardous methods of recycling and
disposal were employed (such as the use of acids to strip copper and other
metals from circuit boards in open, unprotected environments).
Anecdotally,
I have been told by recyclers in southern China that cheap,
secondhand electronics exported from the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, the
European Union were used by Chinese computer labs, offices and dormitories in
the 1990s through the mid-2000s, when new gadgetry simply wasn’t affordable.
(There has been no comprehensive survey to verify these claims, however.)
It was
a good deal for the U.S., too: In the 1990s and early
2000s,
America didn’t really have an electronics-recycling sector, and those machines
would have been put in a landfill if China hadn’t wanted them. Nonetheless, as
China developed, and incomes rose, demand for those used machines dropped off.
The
good news is that a similar cycle is occurring in Africa, where used electronics from the EU and the U.S. have become a critical
means of bridging the global digital gap. Unlike Chinese imports in the 1990s
and early 2000s, the African imports are being surveyed and quantified.
For
example, a 2011 study by the United Nations Environment Program determined that only 9 percent of the used electronics imported by
Nigeria -- a country that is regularly depicted as a dumping ground for foreign
e-waste -- didn’t work or were unrepairable, and thus bound for a recycler or a
dump. The other 91 percent were reusable and bound for consumers who couldn’t
afford new products.
Nigerian Experience
That
certainly doesn’t excuse the hazardous means that some Nigerians use to recycle
old electronics (and, increasingly, those old
electronics are thrown away by middle-class Nigerians, rather than being
imported from abroad). Yet it also doesn’t suggest that the U.S., Europe or
even China (a growing source of e-waste) are to blame, either.
So
what happens to the 14 percent of U.S. e-waste that isn’t processed
domestically, sent for “final disposal” in other countries, or isn’t otherwise
unknown? According to the trade commission report, most is exported
as recycled commodities to be reused by manufacturers in new products; as
reusable gadgets; and even as warrantied products for repair.
Less
than half of those exports, by weight, go to developing countries; the majority
is shipped to member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development, such as Japan and Belgium, where the recyclable material is handled better in factories than it
can be in America.
The
U.S. shipped almost three times as much e-waste to Belgium in 2011 as it did to
sub-Saharan Africa, according to the trade commission.
Why?
Belgium has one of the world’s best (and cleanest) factories for the extraction of
precious metals from circuit boards and other complicated devices. It is thus
capable of paying far more for them than a recycler in Nigeria with little more
than some jars of acid capable of refining gold, though not platinum and other
precious metals.
The
biggest story embedded in the trade commission’s story isn’t that U.S. e-waste
exports are greener than ever. Rather it is that the domestic
electronics-recycling industry has grown into a large, mature business that
views export as a second choice, not the first one.
The
industry generated sales of $20.6 billion in 2011, compared with less than $1
billion in 2002, according to figures from the trade commission as well as the
Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, an industry association.
Recycling Jobs
E-Stewards,
a strict, U.S.-based electronics recycling certification standard that bans
most exports, has grown from having zero member facilities certified in 2010 to 102 in 2013,
including several belonging to Waste Management, North America’s largest
recycling company. Most of what these companies -- certified or not -- produce
are commodity-grade raw materials, such as metals and plastics, usable for new
products in the U.S. and abroad.
More
revealing, yet, is the employment picture: The institute estimates full-time
jobs in the U.S. electronics-recycling industry grew to more than 45,000 in
2011 from 6,000 in 2002. Some of those employees, no doubt, are involved in
packing used electronics for shipment around the world, including to places
where unsafe, environmentally damaging means of disposal are still used.
Thanks
to the International Trade Commission findings and other, smaller-scale
studies, we now know that most secondhand electronics are reused and recycled
in the U.S. The toxic tide that frightened Americans into stashing their old
computers in closets turns out to be nothing more threatening than a trickle.