While electronic waste recycling is becoming widely-used practice around the world, it remains an unsafe and poorly managed system.
Many companies continue to unsafely dispose of their e-waste or send their waste to developing countries to be dismantled.
Basel Action Network is looking to change all of this. The non-profit group started the e-Stewards Certification and Standard to help ensure that e-waste is disposed of and recycled properly and safely.
According to Basel Action Network, companies certified by the group will have to maintain that “no toxic e-waste dumped in landfills or incinerators, exported to developing countries, or sent to prison labor operations and accountability for the entire recycling chain of toxic materials.”
Many recyclers send their e-waste overseas where workers are paid lower wages and deal with lower environmental standards. These workers are often unprotected while digging through mountains of e-waste and are seriously exposed to toxins from electronics materials.
Another dangerous practice taken by recyclers is the burning of e-waste with the hope of extracting gold from the electronics. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, this mainly occurs in China, a country that sees 1.3 million tons of e-waste from TVs, 300,000 tons from personal computers a year.
A Way to With the support of The Natural Resources Defense Council, Basel Action Network hopes to end the bad practices that recyclers take.
“This initiative is sorely needed,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with The Natural Resources Defense Council. “Many e-waste recyclers claim to be green, but in reality they rely on unsafe and ecologically damaging methods like dumping millions of tons of toxic waste each year in China, India and Africa. E-Stewards provide businesses and consumers with a first-of-a-kind seal to identify the truly responsible recyclers.”
To become an e-Steward Certified recyclers, recyclers will have to be certified through e-Stewards Certification and Standard’s National Accreditation Board certification system that has auditing by third parties.
“We strongly support a certified, audited program to separate the legitimate recyclers from the low-road operators,” said Neil Peters-Michaud, an e-Steward Founder from Cascade Asset Management. “We urge consumers and businesses to only use qualified e-Stewards and thus make sure that their old electronics are being safely recycled here at home.”