Battling e-waste

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By Terence Chea

Roseville, Calif., is where computers go to die a green death.

Inside Hewlett-Packard Co.'s cavernous recycling plant in the Sacramento suburbs, truckloads of obsolete PCs, servers and printers collected from consumers and businesses nationwide are cracked open by goggled workers who pull out batteries, circuit boards and other potentially hazardous components.

The electronic carcasses are fed into a massive machine that noisily shreds them into tiny pieces and mechanically sorts the fragments into piles of steel, aluminum, plastic and precious metals. Those scraps are sent to smelting plants where they are melted down for reuse.

The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology's relentless expansion. HP and Dell Inc., which together sell more than half the country's PCs, are earning praise from environmentalists for using more eco-friendly components and recycling their products when consumers discard them.

''The computer companies are definitely embracing the idea that they need to deal with their products at the end of their useful life,'' said Barbara Kyle, who coordinates the San Francisco-based nonprofit Computer TakeBack Campaign (www.computertakeback.com).

The push to recycle reflects a broader greening of the tech industry.

In addition to recycling and eliminating toxic chemicals, more companies are making their products energy-efficient, using eco-friendly packaging and offsetting their carbon emissions to curb global warming.

Still, e-waste is a growing environmental and public health concern as the world becomes more wired and companies introduce new products at a faster pace.

Discarded computers, televisions, radios, batteries, cell phones, cameras and other gadgets contain a stew of toxic metals and chemicals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, brominated flame retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Technology research company Gartner Inc. estimates that 133,000 PCs are discarded by U.S. homes and businesses each day.

Only 10 to 15 percent of electronics are currently recycled, industry analysts say. The rest collects dust in people's homes or gets dumped into municipal landfills.

Among the e-waste that is recycled, activists say, up to 80 percent is exported overseas to dismantling shops where poor workers are exposed to hazardous fumes and chemicals while trying to extract valuable components.

A growing number of countries and states are requiring electronics companies to take responsibility for recycling their products.

Japan, South Korea and most European countries now require electronics manufacturers to pay for and manage recycling programs for their products.

There is no such federal law in the U.S., but Washington, Maine and Maryland recently passed ''take-back'' laws and about a dozen other states are considering such legislation.

California made it illegal to throw away nearly all electronic products last year, but the state doesn't require manufacturers to take back their products. Instead, when consumers buy electronics, they pay fees to cover the cost of recycling those products later.

E-waste advocates are pushing ''producer responsibility'' because it gives companies an incentive to make their devices more environmentally friendly.

Among computer manufacturers, Dell has emerged as a leader in electronics recycling. The Round Rock, Texas-based company has pledged to phase out certain toxic chemicals, and began offering free recycling for all its products in December.

The company recovered 80 million pounds of equipment in 2005. Some computers are refurbished and resold -- possibly overseas -- while parts or materials are recycled within the U.S. if equipment can't be fixed, said Dell spokesman Bryant Hilton.

''Our goal is to make it as easy to recycle a computer as it is to buy one,'' Hilton said, adding that the company's electronic waste isn't shipped overseas.

Hewlett-Packard recycled 164 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges globally last year, 16 percent more than the previous year. In the U.S., the company recycles about 50 million pounds at its plants in Roseville and Nashville, Tenn., and doesn't send any of that waste stream to landfills or overseas.

The problem is far wider than just computers. As more Americans switch to flat-panel TVs, they are throwing out cathode-ray tube sets that contain large amounts of lead.

''The TV industry needs to step up and create some takeback programs,'' Kyle said.

AP

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