Electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, printers, photocopiers, televisions and calculators rely on sensitive low voltages and currents. Tiny amounts of water and air corrode many metals and interfere with the transmission of currents. Gold however does not corrode.
The average mobile phone contains about 24mg of gold, 250mg of silver, 9,000mg of copper, 3,800mg of cobalt, nine mg of palladium and a long list of other metals, chemicals and plastics. In Australia this equals about 80 eighty cents for gold, one and a half cents for silver and six cents for copper. (*) Then there is the scrap income from the basket of other metals and plastics.
Each Australian mobile phone customer usually buys a new phone every 18 months. There are about 21 million mobile phone accounts in Australia.
So that’s potentially a lot of gold, silver and copper as well as indium, platinum, nickel, zinc, cobalt, aluminium, iron, cobalt and palladium.
Yet, in Australia, about ninety percent of household mobile phones and electronic waste lie about in people’s drawers and garages or end up in landfill.
Strangely enough this is because there’s not much profit in the legal recycling of e-waste at the moment. So collection is rather half-hearted and haphazard.
Legitimate recyclers often have to pay for transportation, disassembly, separation, shredding, refining of fragments; along with state of the art capital intensive processes which use wind, magnets, lasers, heat, water, shredders, vibrators and weights to sort through e-waste fragments. It’s a very expensive process.
Their criminal competitors, on the other hand, see the same materials processed at a fraction of the cost. Their profits are high…if they can collect, sort and smuggle the e-waste without being caught.
These shadowy illegal recyclers have minimal labour, health and safety, infrastructure, technology and landfill costs. Their biggest expenses are collection, basic disassembly, shipping and bribery.
The main reason for this is the high cost of safe recycling.
This is because e-waste is hazardous. Mixed up with the valuable metals are some very troublesome ingredients like lead, mercury, cadmium and flame-retardants.
Lead can damage the brain, nerves, heart, bones, reproductive system, kidneys, and intestines; mercury poisoning can cause loss of hair, teeth and fingernails, sweating, rapid heart beats, memory loss, fat lips and red, itching and flaking skin; cadmium poisoning causes muscle wasting, kidney shrinkage, lung disease, gout, brittle bones, loss of smell and arthritis
Up until the early 1990s e-waste was simply shipped to poor countries that had weak environmental and work laws.
Then in 1992 the United Nations’ Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, known in short as the Basel Convention, came into force.
Although not approved by every country (most notably the US) the Basel Convention has made it harder, but not impossible, to ship hazardous waste to developing countries.
Australia for instance does not allow the shipment of hazardous waste to developing countries. It can be exported legally but only to developed countries such as the UK, Belgium, Japan and Korea, which have the technology to responsibly process the waste.
The problem is its still possible to ship e-waste to poorer countries. It’s just illegal for those countries that have adopted the Basel Convention. (The US through its Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has other laws controlling e-waste export.)
Consequently the Basel Convention and tougher controls have provided a new dawn of opportunities for unscrupulous businesses, organized crime and (according to the UN) even illegal arms trade.
In fact due to poor enforcement, of the Basel Convention and US controls, the shipment of e-waste to the developing and third worlds has increased.
Shadowy e-waste operators have recognized it is not just metals and plastics which are valuable, so too are the personal information, bank and identity records on computer hard-drives. Despite assurances made by recyclers that hard-drive memories are erased or destroyed, very often the information remains. This e-waste is therefore a mountainous resource for cyber criminals.
Illegal e-waste businesses often use environmentally friendly names. This normally includes use of the word recycle along with assurances that they are committed to reducing the dumping of e-waste to landfill; the recovery of valuable resources and responsible environmental recycling.
A classic example of this is the US company EarthEcycle. In June this year the EPA charged EarthEcycle with illegally exporting e-waste to Hong Kong.
The recycling of e-waste is a booming industry. The main destination is China, followed by Pakistan, India and Nigeria.
Even the UN has noted that much of the world’s E-waste seems to disappear into a black hole.
The trade into China is remarkable as China has not only agreed to the Basel Convention but has very precise laws prohibiting the import of e-waste. Yet stacked up in the backyards, streets, streams and fields of Guiyu in Guangdong (the world’s biggest e-waste dump) are computer, printer and mobile phone parts which have clearly been imported into China from developed countries all over the world, including Australia.
Typically an illegal recycling organisation works like this.
Businesses (for instance with five or more computers) pay a fee to the e-waste recycler to take their old phones, computers etc. (First income point).
The recycler might then take out and sell the easy-to-remove metals and plastics. These are sold on the local market (Second income point).
The remaining waste is exported using false shipping documents. The waste is often described as “donated electronics” or “non faulty used electronics”. Customs agents are then employed by the recycler to bribe government officials once the waste arrives at the importing country. The waste is then cleared by customs and sold at a per kilo rate to waste wholesalers. (Third income point)
These wholesalers then resell the waste onto small backyard and household businesses that tear apart, chisel at and heat the components to gain metals, glass and plastics for resale. What is not used is dumped.
Occasionally e-waste recyclers may have an “investment or joint venture” in a smelter. Here metals are scraped out and heated at very high temperatures by workers who are paid between five to eight dollars a day; working in appalling conditions. This smelting investment gives the recyclers a share of the profits from the sale of circuit board precious metals. (Fourth income point).
(*) Prices are based on figures for October 2009.
http://www.preciousmetals.umicore.com , Publications, Recovering special metals.
http://www.goldipedia.gold.org/
http://www.step-initiative.org
http://www.ban.org/Library/Features/081109_following_the_trail.html
http://www.ban.org/Library/PittsburghScam.pdf
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7204639/Earthecycle-EPA-Complaint)
http://www.basel.int/pub/simp-guide.pdf
http://www.step-initiative.org/pdf/Annual_Report_2008.pdf p21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXwo6MntpA (Part 2 of Digital Dumping Ground)
