Toxic avengers

Patrick Calkins, owner of OEMSupport.com in Reno, remembers the item that clued him in to the problem of electronic waste, or e-waste. It was a 15-inch monitor given to him by a friend. It was larger than the monitor he used at the time, but it went on the fritz.

“That was a big monitor to me,” says the 26-year-old software designer. “I didn’t want to chuck the thing. So I decided to tear it down. I saw what kind of components are in there and started doing some research on the Internet. That’s when I found out about the lead. Then I found out that there were a lot of EPA regulations that were being set in place at the time, especially in California, regarding throwing those guys away. I was all, ‘Wow, I did not know that.’ “

Monitors have lead mixed into the glass—like high-dollar leaded crystal. It improves the clarity and the optical quality of the glass and helps shield the eyes from harmful radiation. When monitors land in landfills, they are ground up under tractor tires. Rainwater comes down and leaches the lead out and moves it into the groundwater, where it eventually can make it into the drinking water. Lead is a toxic substance that even in small quantities can cause brain damage in children and other diseases in the central and peripheral nervous systems, blood system and kidneys.

Take a stroll around your home or office. Look in the crannies, the closets, the garage, the attic, the places you store things you don’t think you’ll ever use again but can’t bring yourself to dispose of properly.

You probably noticed that a lot of that stuff is electronic in nature: old computers, monitors, printers, maybe even old VCRs, beta tape players or microwave ovens.

Most Americans could find some of this stuff gathering dust in their homes and offices. Like Calkins, most people find it’s hard to throw this stuff away because it was expensive when it was new, sometimes just a few years before. It may even still work, if relatively slowly. But advances in technology quickly render cutting-edge tools obsolete and about as desirable as an eight-track tape player and an Abba Greatest Hits tape.

Now, think about all those times the old Commodore 64 or the dot-matrix printer wound up in the trash can. Maybe you were moving and you decided the day you’d “donate” it to a school would never dawn. Even then, those marginally aware of environmental issues probably heard a small alarm go off.

This e-waste is a serious environmental hazard, as Calkins found. Computers and electronics have many toxic components, everything from lead and cadmium in monitor tubes and batteries to mercury in switches to chromium in housings.

The numbers are daunting. According to the Clean Computer Campaign’s annual report card, which was released in January, “It is estimated that 60 million new PCs enter the market and 12 million are disposed of each year in the United States. Add the unknown numbers of old computer products hidden in basements or garages, and the result is a staggering mass of plastic, metal, chemical and glass ‘junk.’

“The National Safety Council predicts that, in the United States, between 315 million and 680 million computers will become obsolete within the next few years. The waste will contain more than 4 billion pounds of plastic, 1 billion pounds of lead, 1.9 million pounds of cadmium, 1.2 million pounds of chromium and nearly 400,000 pounds of mercury.”

As the laws and regulations stand, the problem is not being addressed, since less than 10 percent of outdated computer products are refurbished or recycled. Nevada’s laws are lax, at least in comparison to states like California and Massachusetts, which have zero tolerance for electronic components ending up in landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency has a few federal laws that apply here. Because of EPA regulations, it is illegal for businesses in Nevada to dump monitors or televisions, the cathode ray tubes that make up so much of our information and entertainment technology, but that’s about the extent of it.

Still, as private industry steps up to the plate, maybe world legislation is on deck to avert an environmental disaster. There are places on the planet that have already been contaminated by e-waste to the extent that the water can no longer be consumed. Fortunately, some local businesses, nonprofit organizations and individuals have taken up the Earth’s standard, hoping to decrease the impacts of toxic e-waste for future generations—while earning a few bucks in the process.

Garbage in, garbage out

Calkins looks around the break room of his new recycling facility, OEMSupport.com, and shrugs his shoulders. The Gen-Xer was a computer programmer before he started the recycling company in 2000, with the idea of working with the original equipment manufacturers.

“I was living down here at the time, but I was up in Tahoe when I first started thinking about starting the business,” he says. “I grew up in Tahoe. It’s such beautiful place, and the last thing you want to do is destroy it. I was just thinking about how, up at Tahoe, they have so many regulations against development. Tahoe is basically the same now as when I left it. I started thinking that I don’t want to destroy the land, I don’t want to ruin what we have here, and that’s kind of where everything started to take off.

“We were over on Spice Island [in Sparks] for about two years until February. That was a 7,000-square-foot building. It was 5,000 square feet inside, and we had a fenced-in area of about 2,000 feet outside. Not a whole lot of space. Within a year and a half to two years, we moved into this building, which is about 20,000 square feet. I expect in about another two years we’ll outgrow this building. Maybe double in size. The growth rate has been exponential.”

With his blue eyes, spiked, bleached blond hair and snowboarder demeanor, Calkins seems an unlikely entrepreneur. But a tour through the warehouse quickly dispels that notion. The building is huge but clean. There are CRTs everywhere, on pallets stacked 12 feet high. Down the aisles are other things: an old mainframe computer, an ancient television screen, a refrigerator, printers. Somewhere in the vast room is storage of used cell phones.

Standing on a platform overlooking the operation, but under Pat’s watchful eye, his father, Russ, the general manager, explains the recycling process for electronics.

“When the monitors come in here, they are demanufactured,” says the engineer and proud father. “The plastic gets set in one area, all the metal gets taken off and set in another area. The circuit boards are set aside. The glass bottle is taken off, put into a box and palletized. When there are enough to fill up a trailer, they are sent off to the smelter. All the bottles are melted down, and the lead is extracted. They take the glass and do a number of things with it. For example, they make shot out of it—like for sandblasting—but they use it for glass blasting. The metals all get sent to a company that separates all the metal into ferrous and non-ferrous, and they get turned back into automobiles or coffee cups or beer cans or whatever.”

The process doesn’t stop with the monitors. Just about any device with a circuit board has toxic components. For example, the circuit boards all have soldered pieces. Since solder is made of lead and tin, improper disposal again puts the environment at risk.

“The circuit boards get ground up, and when you get enough of that, eight or 10 tons, that gets sent to the smelter. It all gets refined, and they pull out any gold, silver, copper, aluminum, lead, tin and whatever else they recover from the circuit boards, and those go back to the appropriate industry. The plastics all get ground up, and they go to a polymer company here in the United States. The object is that nothing goes to the landfill, and nothing gets containerized and shipped overseas.”

Pat Calkins’ 15-inch monitor has grown to a substantial business that deals with equipment manufacturers (such as builders of slot machines), school districts and government organizations, right down to the individual who has an old monitor in the garage and $15 to pay Calkins to dispose of it properly. In the last six months, he’s recycled more than 15,000 monitors and 8,000 other items, including printers, scanners and keyboards. He charges money only to accept the monitors.

A global problem

Even though most electronic equipment is used in industrialized nations, such as the United States and Japan, much of the world’s environmental damage is being done in Third World countries. Russ Calkins alluded to the problem of the removal of outdated electronic equipment from our shores to countries like China, where it is partially taken apart, the valuable components and elements sold to electronics manufactures, the remainder left on the ground or burned.

Back in 2002, the world looked in horror at the plight of Guiyu, China, a cluster of five villages in Guangdong province about 150 miles northeast of Hong Kong. Their dependence upon the computer recycling market led to high incidences of cancers, and residents of some towns must drink only imported bottled water because of the level of pollution. Some environmental groups say this is just the tip of the iceberg and that as much as 80 percent of the old computers, monitors and printers collected for “recycling” in the United States wind up in China, India and Pakistan.

The elder Calkins said he often receives calls from people who want to buy trailer loads of their un-dismantled electronics—he believes for transport across the ocean.

“There are people who are willing to pay you for these monitors because they put them in a container, and they ship them off to China,” he says. “They dump them in these villages, so these villagers can pull out the copper, whatever, without respect for the fact that it’s contaminating the ground and the groundwater. We’ve turned their villages into something worse than our landfills. The Chinese government, not quite a year ago, enacted a law prohibiting their country to be used as a dumping ground for U.S. electronics. Four months ago, they seized 11 containers in one of their ports, all electronic stuff that was slated for de-manufacture. One of my jobs is to make sure that none of this ends up in places like that. That’s why we only deal with U.S. companies. We want to make sure nothing ends up in a landfill.”

Pat Calkins has developed software that tracks the status of equipment from OEMSupport’s acceptance to the smelter. The Calkinses believe that eventually the government’s going to get a clue about the toxicity of this material.

“We know that sooner or later somebody is going to say, ‘You guys, IGT, whoever, we know you had 600 monitors. What did you do with them all?” Russ Calkins says. “Pat’s program answers all that and gives them a complete audit. Now the state is real interested in statistical information as to how much of this stuff is being diverted from the landfill.”

Pat says his tracking software, while working, has a long way to go before it’s completed. He seems unconcerned, since building software programs is his idea of fun.

“It’ll track everything through its various stages of being broken down and processed to the final destinations. It’ll generate your reports, it’ll do all your statistical analysis on the type of equipment coming in, who’s producing what. Then you can look at your economic impacts and your environmental impacts. You can say, ‘I was able to take 50,000 tons of hazardous material that came from these regions that used to go into the landfill.’ “

Calkins’ tracking program appears a step in the right direction, one of the few steps being taken in the United States, which has lagged far behind what other industrialized countries are doing to prevent e-waste disasters such as those seen in China.

“There’s not much being done [at the federal level],” says U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. “There’s been little attention focused on that.”

Reid says that national legislators recently have been focused on things other than e-waste—like the war with Iraq—but, even here at home, environmental issues like prevention of drilling for oil in Alaska have been on the front burner.

Europe has taken the lead on reducing e-waste by making manufacturers responsible for taking back their used products. This is called, in techno-jargon, “extended producer responsibility.”

The European Union, in February, passed legislation on “waste from electrical and electronic equipment"—the WEEE Directive—based on this idea. Under the WEEE law, by 2005 authorities must introduce legislation for free take-back of waste goods by consumers and ensure that equipment manufacturers are responsible for financing the collection, treatment, recovery and disposal of all e-waste.

Another set of EU laws, also enacted in February—the ‘Restrictions on Hazardous Substances Directive"—require that manufacturers cease using lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and the brominated flame retardants PBDE and PBB after July 1, 2006.

The United States has been slow to jump on the e-waste bandwagon, although American companies that are operating in Europe will fall under the new laws’ umbrella.

Out of the landfill, into users’ hands

Back on this side of the pond, the three tenets of sustainability—recycle, reuse, reduce—have other proponents in the Truckee Meadows besides Pat Calkins.

Another Gen-Xer, Aimee Wittler, 28, is the executive director of Disability Resources. Disability Resources is a nonprofit agency that aids the northern Nevada disabled community through employment development, supportive-living programs, children’s behavior-management programs, and New-to-You Computers.

New-to-You Computers is a program that accepts donations of used computers, wipes the drives, refurbishes the machines and gets them into the hands of disabled people—keeping older computers, to some extent, out of Northern Nevada landfills. New-to-You Computers also sells some used computers to help finance the free-computers aspect. While most of these computers aren’t state-of-the-art, the at-least Pentium quality boxes are plenty good for people who don’t have newer computers to compare them to.

“They may not be considered state-of-the-art by us, but by people who’ve never had a computer, they’re great for starting out. We usually give them a Pentium computer at the least, but it’s usually more like a Pentium 1 or 2. We used to give 486s away. We won’t give those out anymore. All are Internet ready, because that’s the main requirement of people, even people with disabilities.”

In the four years since the program started, Disability Resources has given away more than 400 computers to handicapped people.

“We put one ad in the paper, and we got hundreds of responses from people who wanted to give us computers, and we realized that there was bigger appetite for this than we thought. Our original goal was that we wanted to teach people with disabilities how to use computers and then supply them in the home.”

Wittler’s problem these days isn’t getting equipment donations—the back room is piled to the rafters with monitors (14-15-inch monitors starting at $20, 17-inch monitors starting at $60), printers (Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5Ls, $150), cables ($1) and power supplies ($5).

Her problem is volunteers. While she has plenty of machinery, it takes skill to wipe the memories off drives on the computers that are going out the door and to repair broken devices. She stresses that she doesn’t need technicians; regular users of computers probably have the necessary abilities, but volunteers are few and far between—especially when the need is so great. These days, the agency doesn’t even teach people how to use the computers it gives out.

“We don’t do a lot of training in that respect,” she says. “We can barely handle getting them a computer at this point. The amount of people wanting them is so great that we don’t have time to even set them up; we’re just trying to get them out the door. Right now, we have 80 people waiting. We hate to have that many people waiting for a computer.”

Wittler, who received her bachelor’s degree in psychology at UNR in 1997, got her start in the nonprofit business in 1998 when her old boss skipped town.

“I was a case manager for like six months,” she says. “After six months, the executive director came in one day and said, ‘We’re leaving.’ So there was nobody to run it, and the board didn’t really know what to do with it. I went to them and did a proposal and said, ‘You can pay me $10 an hour to run this whole nonprofit. I’ll figure it all out, and when I bring in X amount of dollars, you can pay me X. Now we serve about 60-70 clients a month. Back then we had three clients.”

Another aspect of Disability Resources’ technology program is the reuse of cellular phones. The agency accepts donations of used cell phones and sells them to another nonprofit, which gives them to families in undeveloped countries.

“That nonprofit pays us money and keeps every single one out of the landfills, and also sends them to Third World countries as a family’s first phone,” she says.

Cell phones are a growing source of e-waste. Since cell phones often don’t work on other companies’ networks, the phone becomes useless the moment a subscriber changes plans. And subscribers change plans every 18 months, according to INFORM, an independent research organization that examines how business practices affect the environment and human health.

The news just gets worse, according to a report the organization released last May.

Cell phone use has grown from 340,000 subscribers in 1985 to over 128 million in 2001 in the United States, states the report, Waste in the Wireless World: The Challenge of Cell Phones. By 2005, about 130 million of these phones, weighing approximately 65,000 tons collectively, will be trashed annually in the United States. Most of them will initially be stored away in closets and drawers, creating a stockpile of about 500 million used phones that will soon enter the waste stream.

And guess what? All those phones are constructed with the same materials found in computers, including persistent poisons that accumulate in the environment, such as arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel and zinc. Ironically, some people worry about whether brain cancer is caused by talking on the danged things.

Youth of a nation

The 12-year-old, twin Eagle scouts sit in chairs espousing their individual efforts to raise awareness about the environment. The one with neater hair, Tim Hansen, started a program last year to recycle phone books. Last year, his program recycled more than 18 tons of phone books in Sparks.

The one with the tousled hair, Craig Hansen, recently began an effort to recycle printer and fax cartridges. There is one other method of telling the blue-eyed, brown-haired twins apart, Craig has 45 merit badges, while Tim has 46. They both have more than double the number required for Eagle Scout, an honor that usually comes to boys four or five years older.

At his father’s urging, Craig recites the story and statistics that got him involved in recycling e-waste.

“I saw a paper that said, ‘ink cartridge recycling.’ I thought, ‘Oh, what’s the big deal? They’re just ink cartridges.’ I found out that like 100,000 used cartridges waste 21,165 pounds of aluminum, 40 tons of plastic and 264,200 gallons of oil. That’s a lot of stuff being wasted. I decided to pick this [idea] up and try to feed it into the whole city, so that businesses could say, ‘Hey, this is a good thing. And we can help this Boy Scout get his Hornaday award.’ “

The William T. Hornaday Silver Medal is an award that’s been given to Boy Scouts since 1914 to recognize the relationship between conservation and scouting. No Nevadan has ever won the award.

Craig would like to partner up with a private company to set up collection bins, knowing that the more cartridges collected, the more money Troop 14 makes and the more the environment benefits.

“What I’d like to see in the future is collection bins at, like, McDonald’s,” says the father. “We’re trying to get McDonald’s to sponsor it, so we can tell citizens, ‘Hey, this is a worthwhile thing, and you don’t even have to find a business or school to drop off your things, you just have to go to McDonald’s or your local grocery store and put it in the bin.’ “

“The profit we make from McDonald’s, we’d give half of it to our troop and half would go to the Ronald McDonald House,” adds Craig. He’d be satisfied if the fast-food giant, whose packaging has often gotten the company dissed by environmentalists, would help him out—either that or another partnership with the school district to help fund music programs, which have been cut because of the state’s budget crunch.

In the meantime, while Tim struggles to keep awake in the neighboring chair, Craig produces more sobering statistics, “Over 30 million inkjet cartridges are used in the United States every year, and less than 5 percent are being recycled.”

He seems a little perplexed by some companies’ disregard for the environment and the people who live within it.

“The companies say don’t recycle them,” he says. “If you give them back to the ink-cartridge people, they’ll just grind them up and throw them away because they want you to buy more new products. The recycled products don’t make them any money.”

Still, his program is doing pretty well in its nascent days, making more than $300 in three months, although that number is a little skewed, since Sparks mayor Tony Armstrong provided him with a whole bag of cartridges—the result of another would-be recycler’s failure to pick up the booty.

This booty is far less pricey than those beta tape players, microwaves or even the eight-track players with Abba Greatest Hits tapes that are taking up space in homes and offices around northern Nevada. Some of the smaller cartridges are worth only 75 cents to a cartridge refiller.

The boys seem genuinely interested by the types of e-waste being generated for, and in some cases, kept out of Truckee Meadows’ landfills. Craig tells the story of how a trip to the California redwoods fostered his interest in preserving the environment, but like most boys, when distractions arise—like nickel metal hydride batteries being placed into a digital camera—they must be addressed. Environmental awareness is always uppermost in the boys’ minds.

“Are those rechargeable batteries?" Craig asks.