We also need consumers and businesses to pay a disposal fee at the time of purchase to fund the true cost of proper recycling. This fee should be based on the materials in the product and the difficulty in recycling those materials. This would lead to competition in the marketplace with manufacturers having an incentive to build electronics that would have less impact on the environment. In the end, it’s all about the money.

What’s disconcerting is that our legislators know about the problem. Under a nationwide contract with the EPA, my company has processed over twenty five million pounds of obsolete electronics for U.S. Federal Agencies. Through a contract with DRMS, we’ve processed in excess of ten million pounds of e-scrap for the Department of Defense. We had to jump through a lot of hoops to get those contracts, yet Washington does little to make sure all other electronics recycling is being done in an environmentally correct manner. Unfortunately, until our elected leaders do something about it, the overseas shipping and inappropriate handling of e-waste will continue.

Regarding the loopholes in this bill allowing working electronics to be shipped overseas. Shipping working electronics, while getting around the legal barriers of shipping electronics overseas, isn’t always the environmentally sound thing to do. You also have to look at the economics of what you’re shipping.

For example, we recently talked with a buyer looking for CRT monitors for shipment to Egypt. We were offered from $2 for old white monitors to as much as $17 for newer black ones. In researching the markets, it turns out that while the more expensive monitors were being legitimately resold into local markets, the $2 monitors were being used for parts in building TVs with the remainder going to dump sites.

It’s not enough to test if the equipment you ship works. If you really want to do the environmentally right thing, you have to do your due diligence in finding out what’s going on with the electronics you sell overseas, and you need to pay attention to the economics of the equipment you ship.

For this reason, our company doesn’t ship electronics overseas, working or otherwise, unless we’re sure that it’s not going to end up being used for parts with most of it ending up in a landfill. A lot of companies claim to have a zero landfill policy, but the truth is that many turn a blind eye to what really happening with the equipment they ship.

For the time being, and until we have Federal legislation that pays attention to the financial motivations behind the dumping, the best we can hope for is an educated consumer who checks out the companies they use to recycle their electronics.