Revenge of the TV Monitor Zombies

The plan was so simple: Write an informative little post about TV monitor recycling. But man oh man did I step in it. Big time. Two well-meaning nonprofits working to prevent e-waste vehemently disagree on what should happen to old monitors. If only they could both be right.

You remember cathode ray tube (CRT) TV monitors -- you probably had one of those fat, heavy suckers not that long ago. Chances are that your monitor is still kicking around, even if it's been crushed into tiny pieces overseas. They're like zombies that way. CRTs are an environmental and health headache because they contain toxic materials, including lead for the glass, as well as cadmium and phosphors. Electronics containing materials like that tend to fall into nebulous regulatory territory.

Well over 100 countries have ratified the Basel Convention of 1992, which is an international United Nations treaty governing the transport and disposal of hazardous wastes. The United States wasn't one of them. We really like selling our hazardous e-waste all around the world to any country that will take it, legally or illegally.

For opportunistic countries, our trash is treasure, the source of valuable metals for new electronics that low-paid workers can extract. At the same time, our trash is still waste. Those permanent toxins end up in waterways and bloodstreams. In one Chinese city that processes a lot of e-waste, lead levels in the water were found to be 2,400 times higher than the limit set by the World Health Organization.

Robin Ingenthron is the head of World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A), a nonprofit trade association based in Middlebury, VT, that promotes a fair-trade like solution to e-waste trade and recycling. (The WR3A website took a hit with the recession, which is why it's out of date.) Ingenthron, who has a background in recycling and worked for the EPA during the 1990s, says the contract manufacturing factories in countries such as China, Malaysia and Indonesia that make electronics for big-name companies can't believe Americans are throwing away practically new monitors. 

His idea is to work in partnership with these factories and pay them to safely recycle CRT monitors, repairing them for further use in the developing world. Ultimately WR3A wants to create a strong, legitimate international recycling infrastructure.

"These are smart people that made the monitors in the first place," he says. "They were completely capable of recycling, but no one had ever paid them to do it." If the factories can make the monitors, his thinking goes, why can't they remake the monitors?

The Basel Action Network (BAN) can give several reasons why not. BAN is a nonprofit organization based in Seattle working to address e-waste problems worldwide that promotes nontoxic electronics design as well as bans on e-waste trading. Sarah Westervelt is their e-stewardship policy director.

"That's a transboundary movement of hazardous waste that's illegal," Westervelt says of WR3A's approach. Factories will test the monitor tubes to see if they're still viable, she continues. "If it's not a viable tube it will short out, telling the factory that it's a bad one. They scrap it. Then you have this six, eight, 10 pounds of lead in the monitor being scrapped inside a developing country."

Ingenthron says BAN has created a virtual boycott of the electronics refurbishment industry, causing factories to turn to the Sopranos of the world for parts. Westervelt says the factory workers are at risk and the unusable electronics parts are creating environmental and health hazards.

It's hard to know what to think. I like WR3A's entrepreneurial approach and how it recognizes the abilities of the factory workers overseas to make useful products out of discarded parts. They already have the setup, and the giant electronics manufacturers trust them. On the other hand, I can understand BAN's concerns about lack of oversight to guarantee that the workers are safe. Plus, I see their point about how, while it's technically legal for the United States to ship out its electronic waste, countries including China have laws against accepting it. It all comes down to how one defines "waste."

I asked Westervelt why the global electronics waste and recycling sector is so full of unscrupulous characters, as both she and Ingenthron had described it, and she responded that everything comes down to money. As long as there's no financial incentive to recycle our old stuff here in the United States, the international CRT dilemma will continue. Sounds like the perfect challenge for savvy social entrepreneurs who have green hearts and iron stomachs.

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