Tag: Manufacturing

29 April 2020 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 5 July 2022

We found ourselves reflecting on our lives and the state of the world during the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. We’ve become increasingly appalled by the amount of waste we personally and communally generate, and even more so, by the electronic waste (e-waste) that our industry generates.

Table of Contents:

1. The Problem of E-Waste
2. Addressing E-Waste as Engineers
3. A Deeper Look at Electronic Waste’s Impact
4. Further Reading

The Problem of E-Waste

In 2019, the UN reported that we are producing a “tsunami of e-waste”, around 50 million tons of e-waste a year. The UN projects an increase to 120 million tons of e-waste generated yearly by 2050 if we don’t change the current trend. Unsurprisingly, smart phones and computers make up largest portion of e-waste. In the United States, there were an estimate of 100 million discarded cell phones in 2005, and 150 million in 2010. Given the constant yearly releases and biennial phone upgrade cycle, we expect this trend to continue.

Under 20% of our e-waste is actually recycled. The e-Trash Transparency Project has been keeping tabs on the problem by placing GPS-based tracking devices into old electronics. They repeatedly find that much of our e-waste is illegally exported or dumped, often by the electronics recyclers we trust. E-waste recycling isn’t cheap, and often recycled material is more expensive than raw materials. Rather than properly processing these devices, many simply resell the material to regions such as Agbogbloshie, Ghana, Delhi, India, and Guiyu, China. In these places, “processing” simply involves burning piles of cell phones to extract useful materials.

We poison these regions by dumping our electronic junk there, just as we poison our own lands and people with improper local disposal. Electronics are produced with many harmful elements such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, and mercury. These materials pollute the air, water, and soil. Combusting e-waste is especially harmful, as it creates fine particulate pollution that causes heart and lung diseases. They cause irreversible physiological damage and retard child development.

A chart of health-risks associated with substances found in e-waste, from Not In Our Backyard: Computer waste and Engineering Ethics, by Marilyn Dryud.

Improper e-waste recycling also causes significant resource loss for rare earth metals like copper and gold. According to the UN, “As much as 7% of the world’s gold may currently be contained in e-waste, with 100 times more gold in a tonne of e-waste than in a tonne of gold ore.” The EPA states that “for every million cell phones we recycle, 35 thousand pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered.” While recovering these metals often requires the use of toxic chemicals such as mercury and cyanide, teams are also working on efforts for extracting metals (such as gold) without the use of these harmful chemicals.

Addressing E-waste as Engineers

The e-waste our industry creates is a real problem. Engineers are responsible for this waste (as are others), and it is our duty to help address these problems. We have both helped produce hundreds of millions of electronic devices, and we must painfully face our own responsibility in helping create this problem. We do not want our community, our bodies, or our kids to be poisoned by pollution of any kind. It is no more excusable to poison the land and people in another country.

The question remains: what can we do? We cannot become luddites. We also cannot remain ignorant to the problems that our industry creates. Like all of our societal problems, this problem is much bigger than any individual. Yet, as the old proverb says: “If we don’t change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”

The following list is how we plan to contribute to the reduction of e-waste. We’d love to hear and share your ideas as well!

• Fight against the “planned obsolescence” virus. Design products for longevity. Planned obsolescence is not a business strategy that we will support.
• Support the Right to Repair, and increase the reparability and serviceability of the products we build.
• Voluntarily comply with RoHS standards even when we are not required to. RoHS aims to:
  • Reduce the buildup of environmentally-harmful waste in landfills
  • Protect manufacturing workers and recyclers from potential poisoning
  • Achieve these goals by restricting specific metals and compounds
• Vote with our feet and become selective about the projects we work on, ensuring they comply with our standards
• Be willing to pay for electronics recycling through proper channels, rather than looking for “free” recyclers who end up illegally exporting or dumping our e-waste. Look for certified e-Stewards, the most rigorous standard for recyclers, who must adhere to international law on trade in hazardous waste.
• Ask ourselves, as Marylin Dryud highlights: “To initiate solutions, the international engineering community must first examine design: why do electronic products include such potentially damaging materials?” What can we do as engineers about our answers?

As Dr. Jane Goodall says, “Remember that you make a difference every single day.” When we all start making better, more ethical choices, we move toward a better world. We hope you will join us and choose to make a difference, no matter how small you perceive it to be. Every individual matters.

A Deeper Look at Electronic Waste’s Impact

Perhaps you remain unconvinced that we must worry about electronic waste. Not In Our Backyard: Computer waste and Engineering Ethics, while published in 2004, provides us with a stark look at the impact of electronic waste. There have been some improvements to date, but not significant enough to overturn the information described below.

• This paper, however, focuses only on computer waste [PJ: so the problem is much bigger than outlined here!]
• The problem is huge and growing. In the US, for example, individuals, businesses, and governmental/non-governmental agencies discard about 136,000 PCs daily – more than 10,000 a week from the federal government alone– totaling some 250 million units annually.
• They are, however, psychologically obsolete, as the life of a PC has deceased from five years in 1997 to two currently
• Less than 10% are recycled, and, of those, most are destined for disassembly in third world countries. In fact, about 80% of “recycling” efforts in the US consist of exporting e-waste abroad
• Computers are considered hazardous waste because they contain 34 distinct toxic substances
• Discarded electronics account for about 40% of lead in US landfills.
• Cadmium is used as a plastics stabilizer and can also be found in older CRTs. In newer computers, it is used in SMD chip resistors, semiconductors, rechargeable batteries, and infrared detectors
• About 22% of the world’s annual consumption of mercury is for electronics.
• PVC, in particular, poses a human health hazard: when burned, it releases dioxins, which have a devastating effect on humans, settling in body fat. [PJ: Note that PVC is the primary plastic used for cables. Apple has been moving away from PVC, and some others are following suit.]
• These varied substances–about 75 different chemicals are classified as brominated flame retardants (BFRs)16–are used in computers and other electronic devices to reduce flammability, but they are present in other consumer goods as well, including TV sets and kitchen appliances.11 Printed circuit boards, connectors, covers, and cables all contain BFRs.
• beryllium, used on motherboards and connectors, and linked to lung cancer
• Four hours northwest of Hong Kong, lies Guiyu, an area consisting of several small villages nestled along the Lianjiang River. Prior to 1995, Guiyu’s major product was rice. After 1995, the major activity was computer recycling, focusing on materials recovery, which has transformed the once pastoral community into a toxic dump: mountains of computer debris clog the streets, and the river frequently changes color, depending which plastic residue is dumped into it.
• Workers are paid $1.50 a day, nearly double the typical salary, and are afforded no bodily protection, such as goggles, masks, or gloves.
• While e-waste scavenging provides jobs, it has had a shocking effect on the environment: according to testing conducted in Guangdong Province, the site of Guiyu and other recycling centers, heavy pollution exists in 20% of rivers and 55% of precipitation is acid rain.27 Drinking water is so contaminated that it has to be trucked in: lead levels are 2,400 times higher than World Health Organization guidelines. Spot soil samples revealed astonishingly high levels of barium (10 times higher than the EPA threshold), tin (152 times higher), and chromium (1,338 times higher). Copper so saturated the soil that it accounted for 13.6% of the total sample. A 2005 Greenpeace report concludes that the result of the electronic recycling business in China and India is “severe contamination of the workplace and adjacent environment with a range of toxic metals and persistent organic contaminants.”
• A USAID report notes that of the country’s 400 rivers, 50% “are characterized as biologically dead due to contamination from industrial and residential run-off…[and] the lack of a central hazardous waste treatment facility is a major obstacle in properly disposing of toxic and hazardous waste.”
• In 1987, Nigeria became the site of one of the first cases of global toxic waste dumping, courtesy of an Italian businessman who contracted with a Nigerian landowner to store 18,000 barrels of “construction materials,” containing PCBs, asbestos, and dioxins, at the tiny port of Koko Beach. The scandal that ensued after the barrels started leaking was a catalyst for the 1989 Basel Convention.
• In more recent years, Lagos, the second largest city in the world, has been the recipient of nearly 400,000 used computers a month
• Unlike China, where the emphasis is on materials recovery, Nigeria focuses on repair and refurbishment of outdated computers. Hence, the streets of Lagos are not clogged with mountains of computer components awaiting disembowelment; rather, the city has enormous warehouses piled high with thousands and thousands of old computers and peripherals awaiting rejuvenation
• While cottage industries operating out of several large marketplaces manage to repair and resell some of the units, most are taken to local unlined landfills, which regularly leak. The leachate is not recovered and quickly reaches ground water, only 3–6′ below the surface. To reduce the amount of waste in the landfills, they are regularly set on fire, releasing dioxins and heavy metals into the atmosphere.
• Starting in 1991, Japan enacted a series of recycling laws designed to both promote awareness of recycling and require businesses to take back and recycle old products such as washing machines and TVs when consumers purchase a newer model. Consumers pay a recycling fee, ranging from $21–41 US
• While other nations are making impressive strides in passing legislation with an eye to the future and the safety of the planet’s population, the US seems to be suffering from environmental myopia.
• The world’s largest producer and exporter of electronic waste has no national policy governing exportation and disposal of e-waste, and state legislation is a patchwork quilt, if it exists at all
• The reasons why the US has no significant e-waste legislation are complex and somewhat dependant upon the capitalist economic system, which requires that consumers spend in order to keep the economy running. Thus products, while probably not technically obsolete, have a built- in psychological obsolescence factor to keep consumers spending.
• We are so bombarded with technology and electronics now, it has somewhat lost its luster.” With less emotional attachment to our gadgets, it is easier simply to toss them out.
• Another reason involves a recycling fee charged for acceptance of old electronics. Were it included in the retail price, most consumers would not even notice
• voluntary recycling programs that involve even a small fee are ineffectual
• The images of workers hip deep in exposed circuitry, inhaling noxious fumes with every breath; of children romping in ash heaps and tottering over hillocks of crushed monitors; of cattle serenely grazing on poisoned land; of women washing clothes and cooking with water so contaminated that it devours metal: all tug at the heartstrings and silently cry for a justice that is not forthcoming from an international community that could easily mitigate the deplorable conditions caused by thrusting the computer revolution’s waste on the poorest of the poor.

Further Reading

For more on E-Waste:

• Not In Our Backyard: Computer waste and Engineering Ethics
• The Ethics of E-Waste: Are Engineers Culpable for the 50 Million Tons of Electronic Waste?
• What Does the War Against E-Waste Look Like?
• Engineers’ Responsibilities for Global Electronic Waste: Exploring Engineering Student Writing Through a Care Ethics Lens
• UN Report: Time to Seize Opportunity, Tackle Challenge of E-Waste
• The E-Waste Disaster
• E-Waste: The Seedy Underbelly of PCB Disposal
• A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham
• What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem?
• Electronics Recycling: Why Do Some Facilities Reject E-Waste?
• NIH: E-waste Hazard: The Impending Challenge
• Step Initiative: Solving the E-Waste Problem
• e-Trash Transparency Project
• MONITOUR E-Trash Transparency Project provides a visual look at the BAN e-Trash transparency project findings
• e-Stewards
• EPA: National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship (NSES)
• Global E-Waste Statistics Partnership
• Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE)
• A Starter Guide to 2020 RoHS Compliance
• RoHS Initiatives Worldwide
• Up to 90% of world’s electronic waste is illegally dumped, says UN
• 50m tonnes of e-waste generated every year – and it is increasing
• Gold Recovered from Old Gadgets and Electronic Waste Using New Safer Method
• E-waste: From Toxic to Green | India
• A Solution to E-Waste: Chemical engineers develop a biodegradable electronic circuit.
• The Burning Truth Behind an E-Waste Dump in Africa