In a speech last week to INTERPOL, the UK Environment Agency chair Lord Smith called for a European alliance to tackle the toxic trade in electrical waste into Africa. He said better cooperation and exchange of intelligence across national borders was necessary to stop a crime that poses a “growing and persistent risk to human health and the environment”.

According Lord Smith, the Environment Agency currently provides criminal intelligence on illegal waste exports to 46 countries but has so far received intelligence from only 10 countries in return. The Environment Agency believes the illegal export of electrical waste – such as TV, laptops and mobile phones – is the single biggest growth area in environmental crime. Despite 50 million tonnes of e-waste being generated annually worldwide, it says only 10 per cent is being recycled.

“Electrical waste contains toxins including mercury, arsenic and lead, and the health of children in the developing world is being put at risk when this waste is illegally exported and then burnt to recover the valuable metals inside,” Lord Smith said. “Not only are children being exploited and their health put at risk when they carry out this work, but the toxins are also contaminating air, land and water.”

Lord Smith indicated the INTERPOL E-Waste Crime Group would only work if there was more effective exchange of information across borders.

The international Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) estimates over 1,000 materials, including chlorinated solvents, brominated flame retardants, PVC, heavy metals, plastics and gases, are used to make electronic products and their components—semiconductor chips, circuit boards, and disk drives.

It adds that a computer screen can contain between four and eight pounds of lead alone. Big screen TVs contain even more than that. Flat panel TVs and monitors contain less lead, but use mercury lamps. About 40 per cent of the heavy metals, including lead, mercury and cadmium, in landfills come from electronic equipment discards.

The block on the shipment from Massachusetts firm CRT Recycling Inc. was made possible due to a tip off to the Indonesian environment ministry from the Basel Action Network (BAN). BAN volunteers had staked out CRT Recycling, a company that takes thousands of monitors every year from local US schools and governments. They photographed a container in the company’s yard being loaded with cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors. Using container numbers and online shipping company databases, they were able to track the container and its ship to the port of Semarang, Indonesia.

BAN says it contacted the Indonesian Ministry of Environment in November 2009, warning officials of the ship’s imminent arrival.

Indonesian authorities then seized the container and found it to be part of a consignment of nine from CRT Recycling. The containers were returned to the US, arriving in Boston port in February.  The shipment was returned to CRT Recycling by the authorities on 1 March.

CRT Recycling had employed a waste broker, Advanced Global Technologies Inc., which is listed on an official website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a registered e-waste exporter. In 2008, official oversight body the Government Accountability Office slammed the EPA for doing far too little to control exports of electronic waste from the United States.

“Indonesia is just one of many countries now being flooded by a tsunami of toxic electronic waste from the United States,” said BAN executive director Jim Puckett. “Even though our own government knows that the importation of toxic waste from the US is a violation of the laws of most countries of the world, our own EPA shamefully allows the global dumping to continue.”

BAN, together with the Electronic TakeBack Coalition, has been campaigning for a new law prohibiting hazardous e-waste exports from the United States, to bring it up to legal standards already in place in 32 other developed countries.

According to BAN, about 80 per cent of the e-waste consumers deliver to recyclers is not recycled by these companies at all but is simply shipped to countries in Asia and Africa to some of the world’s most impoverished communities where the waste is smashed, burned, melted or chemically treated in extremely dangerous backyard operations.

BAN warns businesses and consumers to hand over their old electronic equipment only to designated e-Stewards Recyclers that have been carefully screened and audited to ensure they do not export, use prison labour, or dump toxics in municipal landfills and incinerators.

CAPTIVE VICTIMS Firefighters respond to a fire at the e-waste recycling facility at Atwater Prison, California - one of the for-profit prisons whose e-waste recycling programmes were found to have exposed inmates and workers to illegally high levels of toxins.

US prisoners and staff supervisors were exposed for years to excessive levels of toxic heavy metals during computer recycling operations, a government workplace health research agency has confirmed.

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) report, however, says the absence of recordkeeping inside the prisons, made it impossible to confirm any health problems from these illegal levels of exposure.

The December 2009 NIOSH report was submitted to the Justice Department Office of Inspector General as part of its system-wide review of all the federal prison e-waste recycling centers. This NIOSH report covered conditions at federal prisons at Elkton in Ohio, Texarkana in Texas, Marianna in Florida and Atwater in California and must be publicly displayed at each institution. Campaign organisation PEER – Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility – obtained a copy of the report and in January 2010 published it on its website.

The NIOSH report says recycling operations at the for-profit prisons involves inmates breaking up computer components, often with hammers. NIOSH concluded that, for years, these recycling operations lacked adequate containment to prevent workers from being coated with dangerous amounts of lead, cadmium and other heavy metals inside the hardware.

NIOSH says prison industry managers failed to assess risks adequately prior to work starting, failed to identify potential hazards with the result that “adequate hazard controls were not established for several years at some BOP [Bureau of Prison] institutions”; and failed to provide any “training, guidance or oversight needed to address health hazards associated with electronics recycling” to staff and inmate workers.

NIOSH found that prison staff and inmates had been exposed to illegally high levels of toxins for years at all of the facilities it inspected except the one at Marianna, Florida. This report is part of the Justice Department Inspector General (IG) investigation, begun in 2006, into occupational and environmental compliance of prison computer recycling operations and the accountability of managers who ignored previous reports of problems.

PEER executive director Jeff Ruch commented: “It is outrageous that federal prisons have been illegally undercutting legitimate recyclers to the potential detriment of their own staff and the inmates in their custody.”