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Indonesia turns back illegal US e-wasteByRORY | Published: 12
MARCH, 2010
Intervention by an environmental campaign
group has stopped an illegal shipment of
nine sea-going containers of US hazardous
electronic waste being exported to
Indonesia.
The block on the shipment from
Massachusetts firm CRT Recycling Inc.
was made possible due to a tip off to the
Indonesian environment ministry from the
Basel Action Network (BAN). BAN volunteers had staked out CRT
Recycling, a
company that takes thousands of monitors every year from local
US schools and
governments. They photographed a container in the companys yard
being loaded with
cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors. Using container
numbers and online
shipping company databases, they were able to track the
container and its ship to the
port of Semarang, Indonesia.
BAN says it contacted the Indonesian Ministry of Environment in
November 2009,
warning officials of the ships imminent arrival.
Indonesian authorities then seized the container and found it to
be part of a
consignment of nine from CRT Recycling. The containers were
returned to the US,
arriv ing in Boston port in February. The shipment was returned
to CRT Recycling by
the authorities on 1 March.
CRT Recycling had employed a waste broker, Advanced Global
Technologies Inc.,
which is listed on an official website of the US governments
Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) as a registered e-waste exporter. In 2008, off
icial oversight body the
Government Accountability Office slammed the EPA for doing far
too little to control
exports of electronic waste from the United States.
Indonesia is just one of many countries now being flooded by a
tsunami of toxic
electronic waste from the United States, said BAN executive
director Jim Puckett.
Even though our own government knows that the importation of
toxic waste from the
US is a violation of the laws of most countries of the world,
our own EPA shamefully
allows the global dumping to continue.
BAN, together with the Electronic TakeBack Coalition, has been
campaigning for a new
law prohibiting hazardous e-waste exports from the United
States, to bring it up to legal
standards already in place in 32 other developed countries.
According to BAN, about 80 per cent of the e-waste consumers
deliver to recyclers is
not recycled by these companies at all but is simply shipped to
countries in Asia and
Africa to some of the worlds most impoverished communities where
the waste is
smashed, burned, melted or chemically treated in extremely
dangerous backyard
operations.
BAN warns businesses and consumers to hand over their old
electronic equipment only
to designated e-Stewards Recyclers that have been carefully
screened and audited toensure they do not export, use prison
labour, or dump toxics in municipal landfills and
incinerators.
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esia turns back illegal US e-waste
http://www.hazards.org/greenjobs/blog/2010/03/12/indonesia-turn
12/10/2010
