On a day when companies are promoting their green efforts as part of Earth
Day, a nonprofit has accused some organizations of causing more environmental
damage in the name of recycling electronic equipment.

Companies that do recycling are collecting used products such as cell phones
and exporting them to developing countries where heavy metals and hazardous
waste from the devices are poisoning poor communities, said Sarah Westervelt,
the electronic waste project coordinator for Basel
Action Network (BAN), a part of the nonprofit group Earth
Economics.

BAN gets its name from the Basel
Convention, an international treaty signed in 1989 to control and prevent
the international trade of hazardous waste.

Last week BAN attacked junk collection company 1-800-GOT-JUNK
for not offering a guarantee that its free electronic waste collection program
wouldn't result in toxic materials being exported to developing countries. The
company held a free recycling event on April 19 at 67 locations in the U.S.
and Canada.

The event was an effort to raise awareness about 1-800-GOT-JUNK's services,
said Tania Hall, a company spokeswoman. 1-800-GOT-JUNK is not a recycling company;
its main mission is to help customers reclaim space by collecting junk and putting
it in landfills, Hall said. The company offers the service at over 340 locations
in the U.S. and Canada itself and through franchisees.

BAN proposed that 1-800-GOT-JUNK's franchisees and recycling brokers sign a
contract certifying they don't export hazardous materials, but its overtures
were rejected, Westervelt said. BAN also asked 1-800-GOT-JUNK to tell its franchisees
to remove from events recyclers such as Second
Life Computers, in Pennsylvania, which exports "non-working equipment"
to Malaysia.

While it couldn't fully comply with BAN's requests, 1-800-GOT-JUNK told its
partners to avoid sending recycled equipment with toxic material overseas, Hall
said. Some partners obliged, removing recyclers mentioned by BAN.

The events had already been organized when BAN approached them, Hall said.
"We could not drop everything and do what BAN asked us to do," Hall
said.

The company could not simply cave in to all of BAN's demands, and it did the
right thing, Hall said. However, BAN disagreed.

"Yes, they appeared to make a token effort to address concerns about exports
... but 1-800-GOT-JUNK failed to set adequate standards for all their recyclers
and didn't perform adequate due diligence, " Westervelt said.

BAN took a heavy-handed approach and launched a media campaign to smear the
company's name, according to Hall. The nonprofit could have gone after companies
causing more damage to the environment, she said.

BAN didn't specifically target 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Westervelt said. A few recycling
companies in the U.S. contacted BAN with concerns that recycling events would
funnel toxic material into export. "It was clear their expertise is in
hauling garbage to the landfills, not in the international trade in toxic wastes.
That's why we offered to work with them, to quickly get them up to speed on
these issues so they could ensure they weren't contributing to the export of
U.S. e-waste," Westervelt said.

Despite its rough approach, organizations such as BAN can help promote responsible
recycling, Hall said.

BAN is working with companies including Sony,
Hewlett-Packard and Dell
to avoid the export of toxic waste. It is also trying to get the U.S. government
to ratify the Basel Convention. About 170 countries have ratified it, but the
U.S. is not one of them, Westervelt said.

The failure to ratify the Convention has made the U.S. one of the largest toxic
waste traders, Westervelt said. The U.S. openly permits the trading of used
electronics and circuit boards with toxic materials under the pretext of equipment
reuse, Westervelt said. But in many cases, the gear is not reused and developing
countries don't have the tools to properly recycle it. For example, three-quarters
of the recycled electronic equipment that arrives in Nigeria is junk, Westervelt
said. "It's so obsolete nobody wants to buy it, so they have to burn it,"
she said. This releases toxic substances including dioxins, Westervelt said.

Related reading:

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- The
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- Vodafone
goes green, will cut CO2 by 50 percent

- Out
with the old, in with the recycled for Sony TVs

- Green
search engine plants trees for clicks

IDG News Service

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