[WSIS CS-Plenary] Digital Divide and Digital waste

[Jean-Louis FULLSACK]

Hello everybody
This important issue wasn't/isn't sufficiently raised in the WSIS documents. All of us committed in helping to bridge the "digital divide" should therefore base our future contribution on the Basel Action Network enquiry outcomes. Therefore this issue should find its place in the Tunis documents on implementation and follow-up.
Furthermore, we should denounce the recurrent US beheaviour in environment matters. Once again the far biggest polluter refuses to join the international community and to sign the highest needed agreements (Basel Action and Kyoto). 
Please, take a close look to the article hereafter, issued today by TelecomTV Daily News Analysis. 
Best
Jean-Louis Fulmlsack
CSDPTT-France

Markets
Dumping in the digital divide
by Martyn Warwick - 28/10/2005 10:55:46

Forward this story to a colleague

The drive to bridge the digital divide between the developed and the developing world is freely acknowledged to be an idealistic and long-term project. But, according to speakers at the ITU Americas Telecom exhibition and conference that took place earlier this month in Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, whilst the gap between the high-tech haves and have-nots may have narrowed in recent years, it may, at the same time, actually be getting deeper.

As an example of the continuing imbalance, a new report published today by the Seattle, US-based environmental watchdog, "The Basel Action Network" says that much of the computer equipment sent from America to developing countries for use in businesses, schools and homes is, in fact, not only obsolete, but also, in the main, broken and irrepairable.

The paper, "The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-use and Abuse to Africa" says that both charitable donations and commercial, for-profit, export sales of second-hand IT equipment are causing enormous environmental damage in some of the world's poorest countries. It also says that some unscrupulous recycling companies export unwanted kit as part of an ongoing strategy to avoid the expense of conforming to rigorous US recycling laws and standards.

The research paper doesn't pull its punches. It says, "All too often, justifications of 'building bridges over the digital divide' are used as an excuse to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipes". It claims that, as a result, developing nations are being saddled with a disproportionate amount of the toxic waste derived from high tech equipment such as computers.

This week's publication is a follow-up to an earlier report that the Basel Action Network issued in 2002. It revealed that 50 per cent to 80 per cent of electronics, IT and computing waste collected in the US for recycling is actually disassembled overseas, often in uncontrolled circumstances, in countries such as China, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The new report takes the example of Nigeria, which, it says, as a case study is equally applicable to many other countries in the developing world. It shows that the port of Lagos alone takes in more than 400,000 old computers every month from the US. That's close to five million per annum, a huge number to be sure but only a tiny part of the total of old kit that the US exports every year. Estimates are that in the US alone over the course of 2005 more than 63 million computers will become obsolete and will be dumped for recycling or destruction. The global sum is of course much, much, higher.

Now, consider that a single desktop computer and monitor can yield as much as four kilos of lead, plus toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and lithium and chunks of non-biodegradable plastics doused with flame-retardant chemicals and you can begin to appreciate the scale of the problem.

So, just one Nigerian port is taking-in getting on for 5 million computer units a year. However, the Basel Action Network research shows that 75 per cent of those imports are "junk that is not repairable" and Nigeria doesn't have developed infrastructure sufficient to facilitate the recycling and salvage of electronic components. The result is that imported non-working, second-hand computers and other IT equipment often ends up dumped in urban landfill sites from where toxins eventually leak out to pollute both land and water.

Despite the fact that many US citizens donate unwanted IT equipment in the hope and expectation that what they give will be put to productive use in the developing world, there is plenty of photographic evidence to show that, all too often, their gifts end up as part of an avalanche of ancient computers dumped everywhere and anywhere in the streets of Lagos. However, even that proof is not enough for some people.

For example, Gary Wollaston, the president of Scrap Computers in the US, insists that virtually every component of old IT equipment shipped to the developing world is re-used. He says, for example, that in Malaysia, in a quaint new take on the nature of cottage industry in the 21st century, defunct TV's are turned into fish tanks(!) and that "There is no such thing as a third-world landfill. If you left and old computer on the street there it would very quickly be taken stripped for its parts and soon there would be nothing left." These bizarre assertions will come as something of surprise to the thousands of those in the developing world that live atop mountains of old IT gear and don't have a recycled fish tank to call their own.

In the face of examples of such amazing depth of knowledge and understanding of the problems of the developing world it is no surprise that the Basel Action Network is struggling in its efforts to get the Bush administration to enforce the Basel Convention, a UN treaty designed to limit the burgeoning international trade in hazardous waste. The US is the only country in the developed world that has failed to ratify it and the Basel Action Network has compiled a list of just 30 recycling companies in the whole of the US that have agreed not to export electronic waste to developing countries.

Meanwhile, the US Environmental Protection Agency admits that some "inappropriate practices" have occurred in the IT equipment recycling industry but adds that banning exports of secondhand and redundant computers won't help solve the problem.
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