As time passed, as with all trends, the topic of e-waste fell off the radar. Unfortunately, for these countries and the rest of the world, the practice of exporting large amounts of e-waste from the United States has not gone away. These countries still contain massive landfills, filled with nothing but electronic waste; everything from CRT monitors, (which thankfully is one of the few illegal items to export due to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976) to heaping piles of circuit green board. The conditions for the people in these countries has still not changed. Entire families still work in hazardous and life threatening conditions, over boiling pots of assorted chemicals, using soldering irons for hours at a time with no protection.
How are these items getting into these countries in the first place? The most recent media coverage of e-waste in countries like Nigeria has scared large corporations out of directly exporting waste. The new way of handling e-waste is to hire and outside “e-waste disposal” company to “recycle” these items. From there the items are exported, sometimes even illegally, to the same countries they were headed to before; except with an extra royalty paid to the middleman.
We’re trying to prevent this from happening. By breaking electronic waste down into their simplest forms and using local smelters and refiners, we leave little to no left over material from our recycling process, ridding the need to ship waste overseas entirely. With this new venture, we’re hoping to influence large corporations to deal with their electronic waste in a responsible manner – by holding them responsible for where their “recyclers” send e-waste.
If you’d like more information on what or how we do it, please feel free to contact us at 1-800-566-4786. More information can be found online at our new recycling site.