Hazards magazine | International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)

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.”