THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  In 2009, I visited a huge e-waste recycling facility in Roseville, California. The first room looked like a Costco store, with floor-to-ceiling shelving lining the walls, but rather than being filled with products to be sold, the shelves were filled with products waiting to be destroyed. There were pallets full of printers, piles of TVs, and pallet-sized cardboard boxes (called gaylords) full of cell phones and MP3 players and BlackBerries. Staring into one of these gaylords full of BlackBerries, I realized that many still had the protective plastic film that’s on the screen when you buy it. “They’re new,” our guides explained.

  Every product in the place was there to be dismantled. Some were smashed first by hand, by workers with mallets and hammers on an assembly line. I watched as a series of identical printers went by, each adorned with one of the blue tags that you have to pull off before use: all new. Smash, smash, smash! I asked one guide what percent of products coming in here were brand new. “About half,” she replied. I was aghast. What kind of economic system makes it more sensible to destroy perfectly good electronics rather than sell or share them? Why not put them on Craigslist? Or in the parking lot out front, labeled with “Free” signs? Our very forthcoming guide Renee explained: “The companies don’t want this Stuff coming back to them through their warranty programs and then have to be responsible for it. It’s easier for them to just destroy it.” And then there’s all the Stuff that’s not new but still perfectly functional. What a waste!

  The products travel along a series of conveyer belts, past other workers who pop them open to remove the batteries to dispose of them separately, as the hazardous waste they are. This step isn’t actually required by law but is vital to keeping the hazardous chemicals in the batteries out of the shreds of material on the backend, some of which will be landfilled or incinerated. It’s one of the ways the Roseville facility distinguishes itself as one of the best e-waste processors out there.

  After battery removal, the Stuff moves along more conveyer belts to the grinders, which sit in the middle of the compound. The gigantic grinding machines occupy an enclosed two-story building the size of an urban townhouse. I saw a TV as big as my couch move into their vicious metal chompers, which are constantly monitored for jams or explosions.

  After being chewed and spit out by the grinders, the shreds of Stuff are carried on still more conveyor belts through a maze of moving platforms and magnets and screens, like a giant’s Erector Set. These sort the debris into segregated gaylords. The plastics fall in one place, too mixed for any options besides landfill or incineration. The precious metals—the prize at the end of the process, the only recovered resource worth any real money—fall into yet another box. These metals are then sent by train three thousand miles to the Noranda copper smelter in Quebec, Canada, where they are smelted and prepared for use in other products. The copper is shipped to China, where it is used to make a printer or computer or cell phone that just might end up back here again. The whole process is beyond shocking; if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes—especially the fact that half the Stuff was brand new—I’d never believe it. It’s like the plot of some dystopian sci-fi movie in which an evil mastermind sets up a global system specifically designed to trash resources.

  In the United States some e-waste also gets sent to U.S. prisons for recycling. From 2003 to 2005, prisoners processed more than 120 million pounds of e-waste, in processes plagued with health and safety violations—often no protective gear was provided, although smashing the electronics released lead, cadmium, and other hazards.67 Federal Prison Industries (aka UNICOR), which manages prison e-waste processing, is now the focus of a Department of Justice investigation for the toxic exposures prisoners suffer. While the investigation is ongoing, an interim report conducted by NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) for the investigation confirmed that e-waste recycling had been taking place without adequate worker health and safety protection.68 Meanwhile, the practice continues.69

  Although about 12.5 percent of e-waste in the United States is supposedly collected for some form of “recycling” either by facilities like the one in Roseville or by prison labor, investigations by the Basel Action Network (BAN) have revealed that about 80 percent of that amount is actually exported overseas to developing countries, where much is simply dumped.70 Some is processed in the most horrific manner one can imagine: whole families, wearing zero protective gear, smashing open computers to recover the minute amounts of precious metals, burning the PVC off wires to get the copper, and soaking components in acid baths before pouring the bathwater into rivers. This is a toxic nightmare of gigantic proportions. You’ll hear people argue that e-waste recycling provides these struggling communities with jobs, but as Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN, says, offering people this kind of work is offering them a “choice between poison and poverty.”71 And actually, since they don’t make more than pennies, they wind up with both.

  In early 2009, Dell announced that it will no longer export any nonworking electronic product from developed nations to developing nations for recycling, reuse, repair, or disposal. “Even though U.S. laws don’t restrict most exports, Dell has decided to go well beyond these inadequate regulations,” Puckett said. “Dell deserves high marks for leading the way as a responsible corporate citizen with their new e-waste export policy.”72

  As meticulous as the Roseville facility tries to be, e-waste is much too massive an issue, with far too many hazardous implications, for that model. The most effective place to solve the e-waste problem is upstream, where decisions about design and ingredients are made. Producers of computers and other electronics could introduce vast improvements to make electronics more durable, less hazardous, and easier to upgrade and repair. (And, as a last option, to recycle.) Some companies are starting to move in the right direction: Dell, HP, and Apple all now have take-back programs that allow customers to return old computers when buying new ones—but they only instituted these programs after concerned consumers and citizens mounted major campaigns, in some cases years long. This issue is too serious and urgent to wait for these companies to come around on their own. We need laws to force responsibility on producers by mandating take-back and recyclability.

  Fortunately, this is starting to happen. At the time of writing this book, nineteen U.S. states (California, Maine, Maryland, Washington, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Virginia, West Virginia, Missouri, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, in chronological order by adoption date)—and New York City—have passed legislation requiring e-waste recycling. Even better, all of these laws except the one in California use a producer responsibility approach, meaning the companies that made the computers pay for the recycling.73 This is a great incentive for the producers to think hard about ways to eliminate toxics and design for repair and recycling, since they have to bear the cost of dealing with the Stuff eventually. If you live in any other U.S. state, contact the Electronics TakeBack Coalition to learn how to get e-waste recycling laws in your state.

  Another positive development is the expansion of the e-Stewards program, a third-party certification program that checks out electronics recyclers and certifies those that meet strict environmental and social justice standards. Facilities certified as e-Stewards commit to recycling e-waste (using a process similar to the one I witnessed at the Roseville facility) at sites here in the United States and do not send any toxic e-waste to landfills, incinerators, prisons, or developing countries.74 Find an e-Steward certified responsible recycler near you at www.e-stewards.org.

  The Away Myth

  So here are all these huge piles of waste from various sources. Where does it all go? You probably already know this, but if not, here’s the big revelation: for the great majority of these billions of tons of Stuff, there is no “away.” Period. We do one of two things with most of our waste: we bury it, or we burn it. Yes, some of it gets recycled, which is as close to “away” as it gets—I’
ll talk about that later on. But there’s another important aspect of “away”: too often, because we don’t want to deal with the hassle and the pollution associated with the bury or burn methods (or for that matter, the recycling) here in the United States, boatloads of our American waste are sent to other regions of the world, often under the guise of being recycled there. Not only is it unethical and immoral to dump our often toxics-contaminated wastes on other communities—it turns out we can’t escape the health and environmental consequences anyway, which drift back to us via the air, the water, and the bodies of the creatures we eat.

  Away by Burial

  In the most common scenario for disposal—for 64.5 percent of municipal solid waste in the United States,75 we dig a big hole in the ground and fill it up with garbage. This is commonly known as a dump, but since open-air dumps developed an image problem (and a rodent problem), some engineers figured out that they could upgrade the hole with a liner and systems to collect the liquid runoff (leachate) and then call it a “sanitary landfill.” That term always reminds me of what green-collar jobs advocate Van Jones says about so-called clean coal: “It represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, not in the actual technology.”76 “Sanitary landfill” sounds much better than “dump,” but they are still just holes in the ground full of garbage that stinks and leaks and that could have been prevented, reused, or recycled instead.

  The purpose of a landfill is to bury the trash in such a way that it will be isolated from groundwater, will be kept dry, and will not come in contact with air. If these conditions are achieved (which happens, basically, never), the trash doesn’t decompose much, which is the point. That’s the “sanitary” part. Your typical landfill takes up at least several hundred acres of land, of which maybe a third is dedicated to the actual landfill.77 (The enormous and now-closed Fresh Kills landfill on New York’s Staten Island was 2,200 acres.78) The remaining land is used for supporting services: runoff collection ponds, leachate collection ponds, drop-off stations, truck parking, and fifty-to hundred-foot buffer areas.79

  So here are the problems with landfills:

  1. All Landfills Leak

  No matter how well engineered the landfills are, liquid ends up inside the chambers. Rain seeps in and mixes with the liquid from within the garbage (rotting food waste, nail polish remover, spoiled milk, the last bit of Windex in the bottle, etc.). It trickles through the dry trash and picks up contaminants (like the heavy metals in printing ink, paints, household and garden pesticides, oven cleaner, drain un-cloggers—you name it) and turns into a disgusting witches’ brew. This liquid, called leachate, can seep directly into the ground, contaminating surface water, underground water supplies, and anything else in its path. Contamination of underground water is worse than other kinds of water pollution because we can’t see it so have a hard time tracking it. We can never properly clean it up and we are likely to need it more with increasing climate change. We shouldn’t contaminate rivers either, but at least they regularly flush with fresh water. Underground aquifers, which contain one hundred times the volume of fresh water found in all the rivers and other water bodies on the earth’s surface, take thousands of years to do the same.80

  To prevent this, engineers have designed collection systems—networks of pipes at the lowest part of the landfill—in an attempt to divert and collect the leachate, which then gets treated as wastewater (not unproblematic itself). But the liquid can only be collected if it doesn’t escape through the liners first, and the problem is that there are lots of things in the garbage that can puncture or erode those liners. Also, the collection pipes can get clogged or broken by the weight of all that garbage. Leachate can also overflow from the top, like an overfilled bathtub. In fact, even the EPA admits that landfill liners inevitably leak, despite the claims of landfill operators to the contrary.81

  2. Landfills Are Always Toxic

  In the United States our laws distinguish between hazardous and nonhaz-ardous waste, which is more of a legal differentiation than a reality.82 Landfills for hazardous waste are more strictly regulated and engineered than those limited to municipal solid waste. Unfortunately, even though it’s considered nonhazardous, municipal solid waste contains a lot of dangerous chemicals—not just from the batteries and paint cans and electronics stuck in there by folks who just don’t care enough to separate them out, but also from Stuff not yet banned from regular household trash, like flame-retardant-treated fabrics, PVC-coated cables, lead-painted toys, household cleaners, nail polish remover, etc. Even seemingly benign plastics contain toxic heavy metals as stabilizers. Researchers have found that leachate from municipal waste landfills is just as toxic as that from hazardous waste landfills. In fact, 20 percent of the top-priority contaminated sites awaiting cleanup under our national Superfund program are former municipal landfills.83

  3. Landfills Foul the Air and Contribute to Climate Chaos

  Pollution comes out of landfills in the form of nasty gases, too. You see, when the organic material (banana peels, yard waste, soggy pizza boxes, wilted salad, etc.) in landfills rots, it releases methane gas, a powerful greenhouse gas that, although it disperses faster, is over twenty times more damaging than the more famous carbon dioxide.84 The odorless and explosive methane can also travel underground into the basements of nearby buildings, which can be a real bummer when someone lights a match down there.

  Methane gas is what is known as a volatile organic compound, or VOC. There are also nonmethane VOCs released from dumps—fumes from things like paint, paint thinners, cleaning supplies, glues, solvents, pesticides, and some building materials. Routine VOC emissions are one reason that living near landfills is dangerous. Common symptoms from exposure to concentrated VOCs include headaches, drowsiness, eye irritation, rashes, and respiratory and sinus problems. Many studies have documented increases in cancer (especially leukemia and bladder cancer) and other health problems in communities adjacent to landfills.85

  Waste industry representatives often promote the concept of burning landfill gas as a renewable energy source, which would make landfills eligible for massive governmental subsidies, or carbon-offsetting credits, and grant them some invaluable public relations. They argue that the gas is going to be produced anyway, and burning it to create energy is better than just letting it seep into the atmosphere. The catch is that landfill gas is dirty gas; it contains methane as well as other nasty VOCs and potential contaminants that can form supertoxic dioxin when burned. Burning landfill gas to produce energy is far more polluting than burning natural gas. Nevertheless, the landfill lobby succeeded in having it included in the renewable energy standard in the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate bill, as well as in the Senate’s renewable energy standard.86

  Composting

  The main source of methane is rotting organics, which are also the source of most of the liquid, aside from rain, that becomes leachate. By simply keeping all organics out of landfills, we could virtually eliminate the methane released from them, significantly reduce leachate, and keep our climate cooler. In many cities, organics—food scraps, yard trimmings, soiled paper—make up a third or more of the municipal waste.87 That means that just by keeping organics out of the trash, we can cut our municipal waste by a third! The best way to do this is to mandate wet-dry separation of garbage at the source—i.e., in our kitchens and everywhere we eat—and then dispose of food remains by composting. This also keeps recyclables from getting gunked up with yesterday’s meals, keeps the organics from getting contaminated with the toxics in consumer products, and creates a valuable additive for soil.

  I think composting suffers from an image problem. Mention composting—or worse, worm bins—to most people, and they imagine quaint farmers or hippie throwbacks. But actually, composting is a simple thing we can each do to get our own household’s materials flows in better balance. It isn’t a big political statement. It is a smart, easy, responsible thing to do. Plus, it makes your garden bloom. If you eat, compost. Simple.

 
Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have curbside collection of organics. Every resident gets a little green bin to keep in our kitchen for food scraps. We dump it into a bigger green bin with our yard trimmings and this gets emptied weekly, along with the recycling and the (shrinking amount of) garbage. In the first large-scale urban food scrap composting program in the country, San Francisco’s residents, restaurants, and other businesses send more than 400 tons of food scraps and other compostable material to be composted rather than landfilled each day.88

  If your city doesn’t have a municipal composting program, don’t worry. Organic waste can also be composted at the household or neighborhood level. I like decentralized backyard or neighborhood composting best anyway, because then we’re not using trucks to haul around this material that is mostly water. There are lots of easy systems for backyard composting. I have four tidy little black bins outside my back door full of worms that chomp up all my food trimmings, table scraps, yard waste, and soiled paper and turn it into a rich, effective fertilizer. When I visited my friend Jim Puckett in his tiny apartment in Amsterdam, he had an attractive wooden box just inside the front door. It looks like a regular bench but you can lift the seat and see the worms inside doing their thing to last night’s dinner.

  Of course, you don’t need fancy compost bins to get started. I’ve seen neighborhood composting programs in New Delhi, India, and Quezon City in the Philippines that use old fifty-five-gallon barrels or just long ditches filled with worms into which residents dump their organic waste. In developing countries, composting is even easier since generally their waste contains an even higher portion of organics than in heavily industrialized, consumer-maniac countries, with all our disposable Stuff. From Cairo to Calcutta, community organizations and sometimes forward-thinking municipal officials are setting up composting programs.