The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand's Lungs (nytimes.com) 51
The e-waste industry is booming in Southeast Asia, frightening residents worried for their health. Despite a ban on imports, Thailand is a center of the business. From a report: Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires. They broke down the scrap -- known as e-waste -- with hammers and raw hands. Men, some with faces wrapped in rags to repel the fumes, shoveled the refuse into a clanking machine that salvages usable metal. As they toiled, smoke spewed over nearby villages and farms. Residents have no idea what is in the smoke: plastic, metal, who knows? All they know is that it stinks and they feel sick.
The factory, New Sky Metal, is part of a thriving e-waste industry across Southeast Asia, born of China's decision to stop accepting the world's electronic refuse, which was poisoning its land and people. Thailand in particular has become a center of the industry even as activists push back and its government wrestles to balance competing interests of public safety with the profits to be made from the lucrative trade. Last year, Thailand banned the import of foreign e-waste. Yet new factories are opening across the country, and tons of e-waste are being processed, environmental monitors and industry experts say. "E-waste has to go somewhere," said Jim Puckett, the executive director of the Basel Action Network, which campaigns against trash dumping in poor countries, "and the Chinese are simply moving their entire operations to Southeast Asia."
The factory, New Sky Metal, is part of a thriving e-waste industry across Southeast Asia, born of China's decision to stop accepting the world's electronic refuse, which was poisoning its land and people. Thailand in particular has become a center of the industry even as activists push back and its government wrestles to balance competing interests of public safety with the profits to be made from the lucrative trade. Last year, Thailand banned the import of foreign e-waste. Yet new factories are opening across the country, and tons of e-waste are being processed, environmental monitors and industry experts say. "E-waste has to go somewhere," said Jim Puckett, the executive director of the Basel Action Network, which campaigns against trash dumping in poor countries, "and the Chinese are simply moving their entire operations to Southeast Asia."
Time for tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds yet again as if the cost is externalized while the profits are internalized. Why not charge a tax on electronics commensurate to the cost of dismantling it in an environmentally smart way? Then the all-mighty capitalism can do its thing and environmentally intelligent electronics will have a lower cost, in turn fueling research into smarter devices from construction to destruction. Everybody wins.
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Most people would rather pitch it and forget it than have to pay a tax. Hence no tax.
Put the waste here and they'd take a moment to consider it. Thailand might as well be the moon to most people; they'll never see it and they don't care to.
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If people would just stop to think about the problems and find real solutions. So waste how to deal, well it is natural resources refined and manufactured, so it is a high concentration of desired natural resources and what needs to happen is that waste needs to be refined again so that it can be manufactured again.
So logically go to the mining engineers, those who figured out how to get desirable materials out of natural resources. So consider waste to be a natural resource in need of refining.
So governm
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Most people would rather pitch it and forget it than have to pay a tax.
Then there should be a combination of carrots and sticks. As with littering in public, there should be fines.
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Well, as with most ideas that start with "let's introduce a tax" the obvious answer is "more taxes".
Maybe the price of raw materials will increase at some point in the future where it's profitable to mine landfills to recover the gold, silver, copper, aluminum etc found in these old electronics.
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It's very easy to make profit on something like this if you can just dump toxic sludge in the water and force your employees to dismantle this kind of stuff with their bare hands for slave wages.
That said.. sorry, I should have clarified: Profitable to done here at home, even with sane environmental regulations.
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It would be a sales tax on new purchases only.
Re: Time for tax (Score:2)
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Interesting, but how do you do that?
If you are actually interested in the idea, listen to this ~20 minute podcast about Arthur Cecil Pigou, an economist who founded this idea in the late 1800s.
Planet Money podcast, "The Pigou Club," Ep. 949: https://www.npr.org/transcript... [npr.org]
Re:Time for tax (Score:4, Insightful)
A few years ago Apple showed off a prototype [youtube.com] for a robot that disassembles and recycles their iDevices. Apparently they worked on it a lot as I found a newer video showing a much more sophisticated setup [youtube.com]. Until you get someone to solve that problem a tax doesn't do any good beyond providing economic incentive for someone to solve that problem. There's a lot of incentive for someone to cheat and ship it all over to the same existing factories in Thailand while consumers pay extra for no real benefit.
Until you get people that care enough about the problem to invent new solutions as opposed to offshoring them you're not really going to fix it. There's an old joke about various countries not understanding some part of a U.N. resolution and I recall the punchline including that in the U.S. no one understood what "the rest of the world" meant, which rings more true than not. Unfortunately there are just too many people who are still worried about more immediate needs that the environment isn't even something that enters there thoughts, and this is particularly true in the places that will take another countries garbage and sort through it like this. In a weird sort of way we need to use automation to put them out of work so that the cost of recycling becomes so inexpensive that the value of the recovered materials pays for doing it.
Sure that sucks for the people who are now out of the job, but if you want something to happen naturally you have to find a way for the real and earnest action that you want to be the path of least resistance. Taxes don't remove this as the low-cost solution and higher taxes only increase the incentives to cheat. And before someone claims that it's just a matter of putting some government agency in charge of it to ensure this doesn't happen, I would direct you to any number of corruption scandals in similar programs involving contracts over the years. Waving a magic wand and saying "let the government handle it" is no more a solution to a problem than saying that we'll apply "machine learning techniques" to it is.
Re:Time for tax (Score:5, Insightful)
What good does a tax do unless you've got a way to actually solve the problem. Worse yet, governments start to get attached to the tax because they spend it in all manner of things that have nothing to do with the thing which is being taxed, and this winds up creating other problems or incentivizing bad behavior [nytimes.com].
A sales tax will, from the very start, incentivize purchasing more environmentally friendly electronics. A circuit board that could be burnt without generating toxic fumes would have a small to non-existent tax added to it. An iPhone made of uranium would have a tremendous tax added to it. So just from the onset, a tax would help a lot in promoting environmentally friendly electronics. This would spur research into more suitable materials for electronics. The sales tax would go directly towards the disposal process and fund those efforts. If your local government steals the money and flees to Aruba, that is indeed a problem, but the problem does not lie with the tax itself.
A few years ago Apple showed off a prototype [youtube.com] for a robot that disassembles and recycles their iDevices. Apparently they worked on it a lot as I found a newer video showing a much more sophisticated setup [youtube.com]. Until you get someone to solve that problem a tax doesn't do any good beyond providing economic incentive for someone to solve that problem. There's a lot of incentive for someone to cheat and ship it all over to the same existing factories in Thailand while consumers pay extra for no real benefit.
Again you are attacking a strawman. The problem you list here is about someone cheating the system. With that attitude, we should never do anything because someone might cheat. The only solution your strawman is anarchy. The tax would provide an incentive to create better and more friendly electronics from a disposal standpoint. And yes, technology might help in the future. That can be said about everything. Our problem is right now, and as such we need to start dealing with it right now.
Until you get people that care enough about the problem to invent new solutions as opposed to offshoring them you're not really going to fix it. There's an old joke about various countries not understanding some part of a U.N. resolution and I recall the punchline including that in the U.S. no one understood what "the rest of the world" meant, which rings more true than not. Unfortunately there are just too many people who are still worried about more immediate needs that the environment isn't even something that enters there thoughts, and this is particularly true in the places that will take another countries garbage and sort through it like this. In a weird sort of way we need to use automation to put them out of work so that the cost of recycling becomes so inexpensive that the value of the recovered materials pays for doing it.
We have more people than ever caring about the environment. It's on the docket of every civilized country's discussion. As for inventors, corporations are the likely inventors. Corporations care about money. Money comes from people. People care about not killing the planet. Have you noticed how much the environment is on the minds of the younger generation? Greta Thunberg and all that? Non-environmentally aware corporations are getting boycotted in record numbers these days, and corporations are forced to take a stance. Hell, when I bought my milk today I noticed it had a stamp that said "CO2-neutral product" on it. Slapping en eco-tax on hard to dispose of items will have better public support than ever.
Yes, people in underdeveloped countries have more immediate needs than eco-friendly disposal. They shouldn't be receiving the discarded trash in the first place. Just transporting releases a lot of pollution. The whole purpose here is to avoid shipping trash all over the world and dismantle it nationally instead. The reason we don't have automation yet is because it's che
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Part of the problem comes when our competitor countries don't do the same. They can then have cheaper products and services and eat into our economic pie. Ideally there would be global cooperation so that the "good guys" don't take a bigger hit.
And dictators often don't care if their citizens are being poisoned in order to save a buck in the short-term. They only answer to themselves. Maybe some ki
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How is that an issue? You get the tax directly from the sale, and imported goods are taxed as well, just as they are today for other reasons. The trash is dismantled inside the country, so there is no way to cheat and send it elsewhere cause the tax has already been paid. The only place where a corporation can cheat is the materials assessment part of the product, which would become apparent rather quickly during the dismantling process.
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The then West ends up with gov workers slowly sorting their own nations huge amounts of electronics with endless demands for more gov support to pay for the hours of work?
That kind of new tax?
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I think you should look up the word 'commensurate', it will answer the question you pose explicitly.
Let me help you: https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
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Once a gov starts paying for the full cost of "dismantling", that new cost will grow and have to be passed on in full.
$500 electronics gets a green 50% tax? 100% tax? For the cost of local workers, transport, collection, working...sorting...
Unless "dismantling" can work in the private sector without gov support and a new tech tax?
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Taxes are not related to capitalism in any way. Capitalism is about the market deciding what is successful and what is not. Taxes will shape the possible paths there, which in capitalism translates into just another hurdle towards success. Avoiding taxes is a tenet of capitalism (in order to be more successful than other companies), just as lying by marketing is.
To the more interesting part, I don't see where it says that anything failed in your link. In fact, the program is stated as being on track, having
I guess it would be better (Score:2)
to wrap it in a plastic bag and put it in the landfill.
Find the shiny! (Score:2)
This was in Futurama. I wonder if the overseers are whipping the children.
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What smells like bloody sinuses?
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"That's horrible! Is all the work done by children?!"
"Not the whipping!"
"FIND THE SHINY, KIDS!"
Break down the plastic (Score:2)
This is a problem screaming for a technical solution. The reason for the smash and burn is the desire to get at all those valuable metals. Scientists have developed enzymes that will break down plastics. If you could wash all the plastic away, there would be even more valuable metals left over, and the enzymes would most likely produce a combustible gas that isn't toxic when burned.
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A plastic eating enzyme [phys.org]
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Great idea, I hear Thailand has plenty of rivers to wash the plastic away into...
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This could be attacked from both sides. Enzymes that break down plastic is helpful, but it might also be possible to develop a PCB that is easier to break down by some particular enzyme as well. The overall issue will be the cost of plastics and the enzyme that breaks it down.
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This is a problem screaming for a technical solution... get at all those valuable metals...
Yeah, except I imagine something like the refrigerator salvage machines, which tear apart large refrigerators and an extract the salvageable metals with very little labor. Example: https://eldan-recycling.com/en... [eldan-recycling.com] I wonder if it would be possible to build similar machines for cell phones, TVs, etc. to recycle them here. I'm guessing the size of a refrigerators means they have high scrap value, but I'm surprised the sheer volume of waste electronics doesn't make a similar economic incentive.
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Yes, it's terrible. No one should ever hold you accountable for your actions.
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Fair enough - as long as your "side" takes the blame for crippling the world economy with your "woke" approach to problem-solving.
Recycling is a scam (Score:1)
Re:Recycling is a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just Maybe, if things were easy to repair... (Score:3)
... they'd also be easy to recycle.
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Welcome to capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
All consumers care about is that they can get a brand new laptop on Black Friday for $289, or a brand new 65" TV for $500. No one cares about what happens to their old TV, because no one tells them they have to care. And do you really, -really- think anyone in America is going to care about the Thai, or the Cambodians, or anyone else halfway around the world?
Maybe we should try this experiment. Let's find an environmental activist who will stand beside a Walmart entrance with a body board sign that reads
Re:Welcome to capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The consumer's responsibility ends when the device has been turned in. It is the recycler's responsibility how the recycling is being done.
Here in the EU, the responsibility for recycling consumer electronics, is by law on the manufacturers and distributors: the WEEE Directive [wikipedia.org].
Maybe the solution would be in putting pressure on countries in other regions to implement similar schemes, and to expanding them and tightening the rules for them: to make it a requirement that manufacturers design electronics to be easier to safely dismantled and recycled in the first place.
What I would like to see is a system of QR codes embedded in electronics. The code would link to a dismantlement manual in a database. The manual would be machine-readable and structured to map the location and type of every screw, and the alloy of every plastic part.
Then some time when robotics is good enough, I think a lot of the recycling could be automated, and devices separated into different parts at an early stage. It would also allow higher-quality plastics to be recycled properly: these wonderful materials that don't get much respect despite having enabled our modern way of life.
A country with lungs! (Score:2)
Cool! (cough)
words of wisdom (Score:3)
Sloppy programming practices lead to this... (Score:2)
With the "RAM, HDD, CPU... are cheap" mentality, people trash all their electronics (laptops, phones, ...) because developers are too lazy to optimize their code and use sloppy programming practices (layer of abstractions over layer of abstractions over layer of abstractions over...). When you hit a web page full of Javascrap code and you ear your CPU fan speed skyrocketing, IT'S NOT OK (tm). So much wasted resources!