The Basel Action Network (BAN), an environmental watchdog
organization, has reported it has successfully blocked the movement of nine
sea-going containers of hazardous electronic waste.The waste was reportedly from a Massachusetts business
calling themselves a “recycler”, and BAN stopped them from being exported and
delivered to Indonesia in contravention of the international treaty on hazardous
waste known as the Basel Convention and Indonesian law.

 The action was made possible due to a tip by BAN to the Ministry of
Environment in Indonesia. Last week in Bali, Indonesia, representatives from BAN
and Asian environmental groups met with and personally thanked the Minister of
Environment and the Indonesian authorities responsible for this police action,
which comes just as the United Nations Environment Program released a report
highlighting the massive amounts of e-waste flooding developing countries in
contravention of the Basel Convention.

 ”Indonesia is just one of many countries now being flooded by a tsunami of
toxic electronic waste from the United States,” said Jim Puckett, Executive
Director of the Basel Action Network. “Even though our own government knows that
the importation of toxic waste from the US is a violation of the laws of most
countries of the world, our own EPA shamefully allows the global dumping to
continue.” In this case, the perpetrator of the shipment, CRT Recycling Inc. in
Brockton, Massachusetts, utilized a waste broker, Advanced Global Technologies
Inc., that is listed on an official EPA website as being an EPA registered
e-waste exporter.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office slammed the EPA for doing far
too little to control exports of electronic waste from the United States, but
still little has changed as there remains no law sufficient to control the flood
of toxic e-waste. It is estimated by Hong Kong authorities that 50-100
containers of e-waste enter the port of Hong Kong alone each day. Almost all of
this comes from the United States according to BAN. BAN, together with the
Electronic TakeBack Coalition, has been campaigning for a new law prohibiting
hazardous e-waste exports from the United States, a ban already in place in 32
other developed countries.

 In 2008, BAN assisted CBS’s 60 Minutes to track containers from a similar
Colorado based recycler to China. Since 2001, BAN has travelled the world
revealing the cyber-age nightmare of e-waste exports and dumping in developing
countries (see photo gallery at: http://www.ban.org/photogallery/index.html)

In this case, BAN volunteers staked out CRT Recycling Incorporated in
Brockton, Massachusetts, a company that takes thousands of monitors every year
from local schools and governments who unwittingly believe their old computers
and monitors will legally and properly recycled. BAN photographed a container in
the CRT Recycling, Inc. yard being loaded with cathode ray tube (CRT) computer
monitors. Using container numbers and online shipping company databases, they
were able to track the container and its ship to the port of Semarang,
Indonesia. In November of 2009, BAN contacted the Indonesian Ministry of
Environment and warned them of the ship’s imminent arrival and the hazardous
wastes it carried.

 Indonesian authorities then seized the container and found it to be part of
a consignment of 9 such containers coming from CRT Recycling, Inc. These were
opened and confirmed to be stacked full of untested, used computer monitors —
each containing several pounds of lead and other hazardous substances — thus
making them an internationally defined hazardous waste and therefore illegal to
import into Indonesia. All 9 containers were then returned to the US.

The containers arrived in Boston port in early February and are currently
thought to be detained at the Boston Freight Terminal with a deadline to clear
customs by February 28th. CRT Recycling, Inc. has stated that they will turn the
CRTs over to RMG Enterprises, of Londonderry, New Hampshire, for further
processing. The EPA is expected to inspect the containers upon arrival. However
it is unlikely that CRT Recycling, Inc. or its broker, Advanced Global
Technologies Inc., will be prosecuted for illegal hazardous waste exportation as
the United States has never ratified the Basel Convention, and the only current
law on the subject, known as “the CRT Rule,” is riddled with loopholes allowing
uncontrolled exports. In fact, on EPA’s CRT rule website (see
http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/international/crts/reuse.htm), Advanced Global
Technologies Inc. is listed as an EPA officially sanctioned waste exporter.

According to BAN, about 80 percent of the e-waste consumers deliver to
recyclers is not recycled by these companies at all but is simply shipped to
countries in Asia and Africa to some of the world’s most impoverished
communities where the waste is smashed, burned, melted or chemically treated in
extremely dangerous backyard operations.

BAN warns businesses and consumers to hand over their old electronic
equipment only to designated e-Stewards® Recyclers that have been carefully
screened and audited to ensure they do not export, use prison labor, or dump
toxics in municipal landfills and incinerators. “Consumers can take action to
prevent techno-trash dumping,” said Puckett. “We must urge Congress to pass a
prohibition on waste exportation at once, and we must vow to never deliver old
computers and TVs to any company that is not a designated e-Stewards
Recycler.”

Courtesy:shiptalk.com