E-Waste Documentary A Real Eye Opener

PBS recently aired an episode of Frontline/World that centered on the dumping of e-waste in the African nation of Ghana as well as in China. Some journalism students from the University of British Columbia in Canada traveled there to document the tragic environmental impact of e-waste dumping, as well as some scary discoveries about data still present on the hard drives from scavenged computers.

Against the stark background of Ghanaian children burning various computer components to reduce them to their various metal elements, the journalists then revealed what can happen when hard drives are pulled from machines. What was truly scary was that they found a hard drive containing sensitive defense contract data from Northrop Grumman. Some of the contracts contained information from the TSA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Needless to say, if a high-tech company like Northrop Grumman can make this mistake, what are the chances of private citizens doing any better? Pretty grim, I’m sure.

I had to laugh when I saw the part where they met with a data security specialist with the FBI, and he demonstrated what he considers the only “sure fire way” to prevent data from being read from a hard drive… taking the claw end of a hammer and smashing the exposed platters of an opened hard drive mechanism. True… this will pretty much make it impossible for the drive to spin up and hence prevent data from being pulled from it, but surely there are less prehistoric tools and techniques that can produce the same result.

The next thing the journalists did was follow the journey that e-waste took by dropping off some items to a recycling center somewhere on the West Coast of the US. The recycling center person gives a nice speech about how the items are all dumped into a blast furnace where everything but some precious metals go up in smoke. They observe cargo containers leaving the facility, then track where there these containers end up after leaving the United States. In this particular case, the first stop is Hong Kong, which acts as a clearing house for e-waste. They observe giant piles of e-waste hidden behind high corrugated metal walls. From there, to the southern Chinese city of Guiyu that has made e-waste its primary industry. Inside this city, hundreds of mom and pop operations take in these materials and melt down circuit boards to get to the trace amounts of precious metals.

But all is not gloom and doom in this documentary. They showed an advanced recycling facility outside Bangalore, India (now a creator of e-waste) that could serve as a model to other countries. These facilities are not cheap to build, which is why the problem of e-waste dumping grounds will continue for years to come. But if a coalition of industry, government, and private citizens were to be established that demanded a more eco-friendly solution to the e-waste problem, progress could finally be made. The current solution of exploiting developing countries by dumping our e-waste on them is neither sustainable nor ethical.

• 60 Minutes - The Wasteland (November 9, 2008)
• ABC News Primetime E-Waste
• Green Careers: Recycling
• What Is the Impact of E-Waste? (At Issue Series)
• Unfair trade e-waste in Africa.(Environews: Spheres of Influence): An article from: Environmental Health Perspectives
• Electronic waste recycling: A review of U.S. infrastructure and technology options [An article from: Resources, Conservation & Recycling]