What’s free, what’s fair?

The Seattle-based Basel Action Network (BAN) has retained its role as a leading player in the effort to restrict the export of electronic scrap from OEDC (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations to countries considered to have less developed or emerging economies.

In May BAN announced some of the results of its e-Trash Transparency Project, which entailed the placement of tracking devices in 200 obsolete printers and liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors that were taken to selected recycling facilities or collection centers.

As BAN and its Executive Director Jim Puckett likely anticipated, several of the devices were found to have been loaded into export containers and sent to nations where certified recycling facilities are few and far between.

BAN was founded when cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, which contain significant amounts of lead, were a much larger part of the e-scrap stream. In 2016, with CRTs diminishing in the scrap stream, BAN has shifted some of its focus to the dust in printer cartridges and the mercury in LCD panels.

The nonprofit organization also is in the certification business, having developed the e-Stewards certification process that BAN describes as “the industry’s most rigorous environmental and social standard.”

Not all of Recycling Today’s readers are fans of BAN or its persistent opposition to the export market. The organizers of the Vermont-based Fair Trade Recycling association say they “differ from the so-called e-waste campaigns [that] ban trade with technicians, recyclers and reuse businesses in rapidly developing countries” and instead “defend and champion African, Asian and Latino reuse technicians.”

“The viewpoints of people on either side of the issue could not be more different, with one portraying developing nations as full of victims, the other as full of entrepreneurs.”

The creators of the Responsible Recycling (R2) certification have long held that lifting the standards of the recycling industry in developing nations is a better long-term goal than banning all exports, and in late 2015 the first e-Stewards certification of a facility in Asia was issued.

Despite that sliver of hope for future compromise, the viewpoints of people on either side of the issue could not be more different, with one portraying developing nations as full of victims, the other as full of entrepreneurs. Advocates on one side of the issue say the global “free and fair trade” of preowned computers and smartphones helps stretch out the life cycle of devices and can introduce repair and recycling best practices to non-OECD nations. Advocates on the other side of the issue ask, “What is fair about hiring ill-informed workers to dismantle devices that may contain mercury or other toxic elements?”

At Recycling Today, we strive to give each side a hearing and differing voices access to the wider recycling community we serve. It seems likely these conversations will continue well into 2016 and beyond.