Critics of used electronics exporting have long characterized such shipments as “e-waste,” pointing specifically to low-value cargoes that are sent to remote locations for unsafe disassembly.
A new report prepared by researchers at Arizona State University has tracked shipments to Peru and found that refurbishment and resale are the dominant practices there.
“The official trade in end-of-life computers [in Peru] is driven by reuse as opposed to recycling. The domestic reverse supply chain of PCs (personal computers) is well developed with extensive collection, reuse, and recycling,” according to the abstract of “Product or Waste? Importation and End-of-Life Processing of Computers in Peru.”
The report was prepared by Ramzy Kahhat and Eric Williams of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University and the School of Sustainability at the university, located in Tempe, Ariz.
“The empirical pillars of this study are analysis of government data describing trade in used and new computers and surveys and interviews of computer sellers, refurbishers, and recyclers,” the report’s abstract states. “The United States is the primary source of used PCs imported to Peru. An analysis of shipment value (as measured by trade statistics) shows that 87 to 88 percent of imported used computers had a price higher than the ideal recycling value of constituent materials.”
The report’s authors did still find the existence of environmental problems relating to the handling of electronic scrap in Peru, including “open burning of copper-bearing wires to remove insulation and land filling of CRT glass.”
The authors also traced the route of printed circuit boards in the equipment exported to Peru, finding they “are usually not recycled domestically but exported to Europe for [smelting or refining] or to China for (presumably) informal recycling. It is notable that purely economic considerations led to circuit boards being exported to Europe where environmental standards are stringent, presumably due to higher recovery of precious metals.”