I don't want to recycle the news, but let's revisit Earth Day. It's not like it will hurt us to think about the environment two days out of the year, and besides I found a story in Thursday's San Jose Mercury News that casts our duty of clean living in a new light.
The Merc's Karl Schoenberger reported that California's Electronic Waste Recycling Act is taking money out of customers' pockets at the cash register while leaving them in uncharted waters when they want to pitch their high-tech trash.
"The E-Waste Act is better known at the cash register, where consumers learn they have to pay a surcharge of up to $10 when they buy a new computer monitor or television. The special tax is meant to fund an ambitious plan to safely recycle old and discarded cathode ray tubes, classified as hazardous waste," Schoenberger wrote. "Yet confusion sets in when a consumer wants to find out how to safely and conveniently recycle that hazardous old monitor or TV in the attic."
Cast in the mold of unintended consequences and shot through with a dose of civil service logic, the law, Schoenberger says, includes a list of 212 state-approved "e-waste" collectors in California, each with a different handling policy: "Some will take it off your hands for free, others will charge you $20 a tube. One local collector charges to take the monitor, but waives that fee if you throw in the rest of the old computer's system. Another charges piece by piece to collect the central processing unit, keyboards and mouse, but takes the monitor for free. To figure what's best for you, you need to navigate a state agency Web site and locate a list of approved collectors in your county, then call them, one by one, for details. Convenient free pickup of e-waste at the curbside is not in the cards. You'll need to haul it to a warehouse or a collection center."
Even more mystifying is the way the law is supposed to work. Follow the link above and go to the "System-mandated" sub-headline. I'll forgive you if you wonder whether the brains behind this operation are abusing the state's medical marijuana law.
Of course, regulations like this are easy to slam because they make doing the right thing more difficult than it should be. Nevertheless, it really is about doing just that -- the right thing -- and throughout America people are figuring out other ways to deal with the problem. The Merc story showed up atop of a month's worth of reporting on how technology waste harms the environment. Much of that coverage was dedicated to Earth Day v35.0, which fell on April 22.
The Associated Press provided the high-level story: "Tons of computers, monitors, television sets, and other electronic gizmos that contain hazardous chemicals, or 'e-waste,' may be poisoning people and ground water. Activists say the nation's biggest environmental problem may be the smallest devices ... and they've launched campaigns to increase awareness about recycling cell phones, music players, hand-held gaming consoles, and other electronics." Cell phones, by the way, are the worst offenders.
The AP in another story zeroed in on Vermont, where the Green Mountain State's residents want the legislature to make their mountains just a little bit greener. The story focused on an April 26 recycling fair -- a better term to describe the event doesn't come to mind -- where residents around Montpelier "lugged thousands of pounds of obsolete computers, burned-out televisions, broken cell phones, ancient IBM Selectric typewriters to a parking lot behind a state office building Tuesday, where three groups offered free recycling of the e-junk."
Even this tiny state estimates that it generated 4,500 tons of electronic waste in 2000. Here are some of the effects on the air we breathe and the water we drink, according to the article: "TV and computer monitor screens are laced with lead. Circuit boards are toxic-rich with heavy metals including mercury, lead and cadmium. Complex hazardous chemicals such as fire retardants coat interior parts. Some of those chemicals escape into the atmosphere when trash is burned, or could leach over time into groundwater if trash is buried. Even improper recycling can harm the workers who dismantle equipment improperly, often in developing countries where much e-waste ends up."
The Providence Journal jumped in weeks before Earth Day with a good story on how a group of schoolchildren in Rhode Island are trying to get the state legislature to approve an e-waste bill. If it passed, Rhode Island would be the fourth state to have a law, after California, Maine and Massachusetts. Here's a bit of color from that story: "Looking sharp in their red polo shirts and khaki pants, the WIN team members, a group of Babcock Middle School students ranging in age from 11 to 14, presented a slide show on their electronic recycling project to legislators. The children's team supports a bill introduced by Rep. Arthur Handy (D-Cranston), which would require manufacturers to take financial responsibility for recycling and disposing of their electronic products. 'It's hard to vote against children,' said Rep. Peter Ginaitt with a chuckle after the presentation. Ginaitt chairs the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, which Handy sits on."
The Wichita Eagle explored recycling and disposal options in Kansas in a story that ran on Earth Day. Reporter Deb Gruver quoted Brian Jones, owner of the PC Recycling Center, as saying that computers aren't good only for refurbishing but for scrap metal-style salvage too: "Jones also sells some of the computers after testing them and either repairing or making improvements. He sometimes buys computers people bring in to recycle. Jones said 96 percent of most computers can be fully recycled. The materials are used to make benches in national parks and new monitors and televisions."
In upstate New York, Auburn's Citizen reported that sometimes the best efforts aren't good enough: "About 85 to 90 percent of the equipment the company receives is dismantled for scrap, which amounts to about 4 million pounds a year. Hard drives go through a data-wiping process. Once dismantled, the pieces go to traditional scrap processors to handle the mixed grades of metals. The small percentage of equipment that isn't tossed away is cleaned up and resold. This is more common with computers recycled by businesses, which are more likely to retire electronics quicker than household users, said Mike Whyte, president of [Regional Computer Recycling and Recovery]. ... But often there's little worth saving. Technicians inspect the electronics for certain processors that have resale value. Most of what they resell are monitors, but not many of those are of any worth. 'For every one monitor we can sell, there's 100 more that get scrapped,' Whyte said. 'What we're working with is a very small window of profitability.'"
