Climate Talks and Electronic Garbage

Talks were delayed for nine hours at the World Summit climate talks at Copenhagen. Poorer, developing countries were angered at the proposal to use new Danish documents as the basis for negotiations, accusing the Danes of trying to shape the summit into something more favorable to developed countries.

But lets talk about something else:

"Every one of us knows that Africa has contributed virtually nothing to global warming but has been hit first and hardest," said Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, on behalf of the African Union.

Which got me thinking: It is economically beneficial for companies to export their trash and their polluting industries to third-world nations. Electronic garbage is healvily exported to other countries.

According to Charles W. Schmidt in Unfair Trade: e-Waste in Africa, "Hungry for information technology but with a limited capacity to manufacture it, Africa has become the world’s latest destination for obsolete electronic equipment. Much of this material is more or less functional and provided in good faith by well-meaning donors. But the brokers who arrange these exports often pad shipping containers with useless junk, essentially saddling African importers with electronic garbage."



Much of the useless garbage is purified and sold as raw material. The purification process involves burning away the plastic and other coatings, a process that releases a bouquet of carcinogens and other toxic chemifals into the air. But to the Nigerian children performing the work, the melted copper remains may fetch a dollar from the scrap-dealer.

Useful garbage, however, is much more profitable: Olayemi Adesanya, logistical coordinator from the Basel Action Network (BAN), a Seattle-based environmental group, says a functional Pentium III computer sells for about US$130 on Nigerian markets, while a working 27-inch TV might sell for US$50. (Scrap components--especially working hard drives--can also be readily sold in Nigeria to supply an emerging reassembly industry.)

No one knows for sure how much hazardus e-waste is exported to Africa because there are virtually no data concerning the global e-waste trade--harmonized tariff schedules that dictate fees for export commodities don’t assign codes to waste electronics other than batteries. There are tariff classifications for scrap (e.g., plastic, metal) and for new electronics by type (e.g., computer monitors, TV sets). Because the importers don’t want to pay tariffs on a five-year-old computer based on the price of a new one, they often use scrap classifications, measured in pounds, says Robin Ingenthron, acting president of the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A), a nonprofit group trying to establish fair trade standards for the practice. Consequently, the volume, characteristics, and destinations of e-waste exports are shrouded in mystery.

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