
The dark side of electronic waste recycling - elorant
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recycling-electronic-basel-convention-crime-total-reclaim-fraud
======
howmayiannoyyou
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
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
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.

~~~
iudqnolq
An extra fee on imported goods isn't a subsidy, it's a tarrif.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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
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
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
> 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
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.

------
destitude
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
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
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
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.

------
hateful
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.

~~~
8bitsrule
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/)

------
shrubble
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.

------
blacksmith_tb
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)

------
dbtx
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
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
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
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
>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
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-
thaila...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thailand-
southeast-asia.html)

------
walrus01
There is a lot more detail about this and its aftermath available from other
sources. Google "total reclaim Seattle".

------
8bitsrule
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

