The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [141]
After battery removal, the Stuff moves along more conveyer belts to the grinders, which sit in the middle of the compound. The gigantic grinding machines occupy an enclosed two-story building the size of an urban townhouse. I saw a TV as big as my couch move into their vicious metal chompers, which are constantly monitored for jams or explosions.
After being chewed and spit out by the grinders, the shreds of Stuff are carried on still more conveyor belts through a maze of moving platforms and magnets and screens, like a giant’s Erector Set. These sort the debris into segregated gaylords. The plastics fall in one place, too mixed for any options besides landfill or incineration. The precious metals—the prize at the end of the process, the only recovered resource worth any real money—fall into yet another box. These metals are then sent by train three thousand miles to the Noranda copper smelter in Quebec, Canada, where they are smelted and prepared for use in other products. The copper is shipped to China, where it is used to make a printer or computer or cell phone that just might end up back here again. The whole process is beyond shocking; if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes—especially the fact that half the Stuff was brand new—I’d never believe it. It’s like the plot of some dystopian sci-fi movie in which an evil mastermind sets up a global system specifically designed to trash resources.
In the United States some e-waste also gets sent to U.S. prisons for recycling. From 2003 to 2005, prisoners processed more than 120 million pounds of e-waste, in processes plagued with health and safety violations—often no protective gear was provided, although smashing the electronics released lead, cadmium, and other hazards.67 Federal Prison Industries (aka UNICOR), which manages prison e-waste processing, is now the focus of a Department of Justice investigation for the toxic exposures prisoners suffer. While the investigation is ongoing, an interim report conducted by NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) for the investigation confirmed that e-waste recycling had been taking place without adequate worker health and safety protection.68 Meanwhile, the practice continues.69
Although about 12.5 percent of e-waste in the United States is supposedly collected for some form of “recycling” either by facilities like the one in Roseville or by prison labor, investigations by the Basel Action Network (BAN) have revealed that about 80 percent of that amount is actually exported overseas to developing countries, where much is simply dumped.70 Some is processed in the most horrific manner one can imagine: whole families, wearing zero protective gear, smashing open computers to recover the minute amounts of precious metals, burning the PVC off wires to get the copper, and soaking components in acid baths before pouring the bathwater into rivers. This is a toxic nightmare of gigantic proportions. You’ll hear people argue that e-waste recycling provides these struggling communities with jobs, but as Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN, says, offering people this kind of work is offering them a “choice between poison and poverty.”71 And actually, since they don’t make more than pennies, they wind up with both.
In early 2009, Dell announced that it will no longer export any nonworking electronic product from developed nations to developing nations for recycling, reuse, repair, or disposal. “Even though U.S. laws don’t restrict most exports, Dell has decided to go well beyond these inadequate regulations,” Puckett said. “Dell deserves high marks for leading the way as a responsible corporate citizen with their new e-waste export policy.”72
As meticulous as the Roseville facility tries to be, e-waste is much too massive an issue, with far too many hazardous implications, for that model. The most effective