The bill, SB 20, which has been forwarded to Gov. Gray Davis for signature, has been the subject of intense debate for over two years. It was originally meant to make the electronics industry more responsible for managing their end-of-life products. The bill also was to address the revelation that nearly 80 percent of electronic waste was shipped offshore to Asian destinations such as China where it was causing massive pollution and occupational health problems. However, according to BAN if fails absolutely on both counts.
“Not only does the bill fail miserably to make producers responsible for cleaning up their act and producing less toxic electronic waste, we are horrified to observe that last minute industry lobbying has created legislation that actually will pay waste recyclers to sweep out California’s electronic waste to the poorest communities of the world via the back-door of export,” Jim Puckett, BAN coordinator, says. “Perversely, more waste than every before will likely be exported, and this time it will be exported with the blessing and funding provided by the great State of California.”
The final bill deals only with computer monitors and TVs and does not make producers responsible for take-back and recycling of their own products, therefore failing to provide market-based incentives for manufacturers to produce less wasteful and toxic products, BAN writes in a press release. The organization also asserts that SB 20 will actually give state sanction to export electronics and provide financial incentives to continue doing so. SB 20 requires consumers to pay a point-of-sale recovery fee for each Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) sold in California, which local authorities will then use to pay recyclers to handle the CRT waste. But, according to BAN, recyclers or brokers who export the waste offshore are also eligible to receive the recovery fee.
BAN’s analysis of the export language cites three major loopholes that will allow waste brokers and recyclers to receive the money collected through the recovery fee though they are not recycling the waste, but simply selling it offshore. One such loophole is, by itself “large enough to sail a fleet of container ships through,” the release states. Under the loophole, all restraints listed in the bill regarding export can be ignored as long as one claims that the recycled electronic waste will be recovered for use in new electronic components. All waste currently recycled in Asia, such as gold, lead and plastics, will likely find its way back into the Asian electronics industry, thus this will be very easy to claim, BAN asserts. Further, and setting a far reaching and unfortunate global precedent, the bill allows exporters to exploit weaker economies simply with assurances that they will be meeting certain minimum technological guideline. This approach, which violates the principle of environmental justice, is tantamount to placing all hazardous waste management facilities in the poorest neighborhoods as long as they are sold as state-of-the-art facilities, BAN contends.
This permission and actual encouragement to use weaker economies, such as those in China or India, as waste dumping grounds is contrary to what the vast majority of the world agreed to in the Basel Convention.
The Basel Convention is an international treaty that regulates international movements of hazardous waste. In 1994 the Basel Convention members decided to forbid such exports from rich developed countries to developing countries; however, the United States has not ratified the treaty. Because this new California permission to export is now combined with a California CRT landfill ban and an imposed recovery fee, more California e-waste than ever before is likely to be exported and exporters can actually get paid to do it, the BAN release reads.
“If this bill is not vetoed, rather than becoming part of the export solution, California will be a serious part of the problem,” Puckett says. “It’s sad to see the best of intentions subverted by industry, so that now consumers will actually be footing the bill for industry pollution of Asia.”
BAN is urging Davis to veto the bill.