Greenpeace: E-waste is mounting problem for health and environment

By The Associated Press

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Millions of tons of disused electronic equipment containing toxic chemicals and heavy metals are being dumped every year without recycling or safe disposal, Greenpeace said in a report released Thursday.

More than 80 percent of televisions, computers, mobile phones and other equipment escape proper handling in the United States, and about 75 percent in the European Union, the environmental group said. In India, 99 percent of such "e-waste" is mishandled, it said. "The introduction of appropriate reuse, recycling and recovery technologies is not keeping pace" with growing sales, said the report, entitled "Toxic Tech: Not in My Back Yard." More than 1 billion mobile phones were sold last year alone. A mobile phone contains 500 to 1,000 components, many of them containing potentially dangerous metals like lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium, as well as hazardous chemical flame retardants.

EU regulations require producers to be responsible for retrieving their branded products brought out after August 2005, a rule meant to encourage manufacturers to use more recyclable material to reduce their disposal costs. Greenpeace researcher Martin Hojsik said the report was timed to coincide with discussions with the European Commission on reviewing the directive for controlling electronic waste.

Within the 27-member EU, recovery works better in some countries than in others, Greenpeace said. About 6.6 million tons of the 8.7 million tons of equipment the EU produces annually is not collected or treated properly, it said. No precise data exists on what happens to this waste, it said. The United States has "a relatively unsophisticated infrastructure" to collect waste electronic goods, but several states are requiring producers to have take-back schemes, it said. Much of what Greenpeace calls the "hidden flow" of hazardous waste is exported to countries like India, China and Thailand. Workers in a thriving "informal sector" in those countries strip down the goods to recover components for second-hand equipment or to harvest valuable metals and raw materials. The process is dangerous to the health of the workers and to the environment, the report said.

Hojsik said exporting such waste is illegal in Europe, but the United States has no laws against exporting equipment for recycling. He said the report, which was one year in the works, draws on more than 100 sources, including reports from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a U.N. University study for the EU commission late last year, company reports and interviews with stakeholders.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Rabu 27 February 2008)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)

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