US environmental agency doing little to curb e-waste exports, report says

Old computers exported can lead to the use of 'acid baths' and children being threatened by burning of hazardous metals

McClatchy newspapers, guardian.co.uk 18 Sep 08;

Those old computers Americans discard often end up in developing countries, bridging the so-called digital divide - when they work.

But there's a dark side to computer exports in which children are threatened by open-air burning of hazardous metals and the "acid baths" used to recover bits of gold, a report from the US government accountability office report said yesterday.

The report put the blame on the US environmental protection agency, saying the anti-pollution agency has done little to stem illegal exports of old computers and other e-waste by unscrupulous "recyclers" to places like China and west Africa.

The scathing report by Congress's investigative arm - which the EPA disputes - was initiated after complaints by advocacy groups and a series by the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper in 2006 detailing the activities of some e-waste brokers and exporters.

Despite evidence of harm, the government report said, the EPA has all but ignored its own 2007 rule clamping down on computer-monitor exports, refusing even to set a timetable to develop an enforcement program.

"To date, the agency has established no enforcement targets, done no monitoring, conducted only preliminary follow-up of suspected violations and taken only one enforcement action" - five months after the GAO told the agency about the case, the report found.

As part of the newspaper series, the Post-Dispatch reported from Nigeria that roughly three-fourths of the thousands of discarded computers arriving monthly in that west African nation are in bad shape or beyond repair, creating messes that pollute the air and land in one of the world's poorest countries. E-waste contains mercury, lead, cadmium and dangerous flame retardants.

The series also showed how Americans can become victims at the hands of identity thieves in foreign lands who retrieve social security numbers and other personal information from discarded computers.

The GAO report focused primarily on dumping in Asian countries, with its investigators posing as foreign buyers of broken computer terminals.

Responding to fictitious e-mails, 43 US companies expressed willingness to export the non-working computers in apparent violation of EPA rules - including companies "that publicly tout their exemplary environmental practices", the investigators reported.

Unlike European nations, the US allows export of most e-waste, such as computer hard drives, printers and old cell phones. The government has estimated that as much as 80% of electronic garbage collected for recycling ends up in foreign lands.

Starting in January of 2007, a new EPA rule applying only to computer monitors which contain about four pounds of lead — required notification of EPA by exporters and consent of receiving countries.

The GAO report noted that since the rule went into effect, Hong Kong officials alone intercepted and returned 26 containers of illegally exported computer monitors but that the EPA had fined just one exporter, a California company.

The EPA contested the GAO report, even the title: EPA Needs to Better Control Harmful US Exports Through Stronger Enforcement and More Comprehensive Regulation.

In a letter to the GAO, the EPA defended its use of voluntary and "non-regulatory approaches" to controlling e-waste exports, arguing that broader rules could take years to take effect.

EPA spokesman Tim Lyons added yesterday that his agency had opened 20 investigations in 18 months since the computer-monitor rule went into effect.

"We're certainly committed to improving the compliance and improving the enforcement," he said.

The report is expected to hasten broader export controls in Congress but perhaps not soon.
Noting "implications for international health problems", Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, introduced legislation yesterday that would impose an outright ban on e-waste exports.

But Representative Gene Green, a Texas Democrat, who heads the House environment subcommittee on hazardous materials and who has proposed similar legislation, told reporters that such efforts this late in Congress amount to "laying down markers" and that he doesn't expect serious congressional efforts until 2009.