Your Laptop's Dirty Little Secret

Phones and computers contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. It's called electronic waste, or e-waste, and the world produces a lot of it: 20 to 50 million tons a year, according to the UN — enough to load a train that would stretch around the world.

The U.S. is by far the world's top producer of e-waste, but much of it ends up elsewhere — specifically, in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years. There the poor, often including children, dismantle dumped PCs and phones, stripping the components for the valuable — and toxic — metals contained inside. In the cities like the southern Chinese town of Guiyu, they work with little protection, melting down components and breathing in poisonous fumes. What can't be recycled is simply dumped, turning already poisoned rivers into toxic sludge. It's all done in the hope of earning a few dollars from the detritus of the clean digital economy.

Officially, this shouldn't be happening. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was established by the UN in 1989 to control the hazardous garbage flowing from rich countries to poor ones. The convention allows countries to unilaterally ban the import of waste, and requires exporters to get the consent of destination countries before they send trash abroad. But the United States, a prime source of e-waste and other toxic waste, never signed onto the treaty, leaving it weakened, and some of the destination nations — most prominently China — quietly allow the dumping to continue, for the money it brings in. At an international summit on the convention held last week in Bali, Indonesia, environmentalists and many poor countries insisted the agreement had failed, and pointed to the growth in e-waste as a main reason.

Much of the fault does lie with the U.S. and its technology companies, which export e-waste because it is cheaper to offload the problem on poor nations than it is to take care of the waste at home. "This is effectively long-distance dumping," said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. One solution is to promote recycling programs for old PCs and phones, as Dell has done recently, or try to reduce the amount of toxic metals used in those products, as Apple has done. The answer will almost certainly have to come from rich importers — for poor nations, the money that can be made off the e-waste trade is simply too good to abandon, despite the environmental and health costs.

What's certain is that if we don't act, the e-waste will continue to pile up, as we buy more electronic devices and the lifespan of those products grows shorter. If we could see the dumps of Guiyu, we might rethink the purchase of that new iPhone.