[0:01]They had a place where they'd store it right under our noses. And they just thought they could get away with it forever. And they could have if it hadn't been for those trackers.
[0:13]Right now, you're watching this on an electronic device. Do you ever think about where it'll end up when you're done with it? Many devices contain toxic materials and should be recycled very carefully. Sadly, lots end up in landfills. But even if you're diligent, give your electronic waste or e-waste to a recycler, that's no guarantee about what happens next. American recyclers often ship it overseas, frequently to countries in Southern Asia. There, workers take apart toxic material by hand, often without proper safety measures. And US policy, let's it happen. But thanks to one small nonprofit, not everyone gets away with it. I mean, they're really worried about our program probably.
[1:01]So, we usually want to put our tracker somewhere where it'll be nice to fit in. So, for example, right here is a good spot. We're at the office of the Bazel Action Network or Ban, a nonprofit group that's dedicated to following the E-waste trade around the world. Ban installs secret GPS trackers and electronics and then drops them off at recyclers to see where they end up. Jim Pucket is the founder and director of band. In the late 1980s, way back when, um, there was a rash, an epidemic of people exporting their hazardous waste to developing countries rather than properly managing it at home because it was difficult poisonous stuff, right? So people say well, we'll just use the ships out there and free trade and go ahead and export it. Americans throw out millions of tons of electronics every year and export abroad is still a big problem. Take for instance LCD monitors that contain Mercury. If a worker in say Hong Kong smashes it, poisonous vapor can be released into the air. Workers disregard electronics can get severely sick and even die. A 1989 Treaty called the Bush Convention does regulate the export of E-waste, but the US has never ratified it. An provision that would stop countries from sending E-waste to many developing nations isn't an effect. The US has been re-missed for many years now, for about 20 some years, particularly environmental treaties. So there's very little stopping American recyclers from dumping their electronics abroad until ban gets involved. And so, the track will go here.
[2:35]This board will end up going right about there. So it still looks like a normal piece of electronic. Without Federal e-waste laws, bans tracking system is one of the only ways for businesses and governments to find out who they want to work with. After we bugged this monitor, we made plans to drop it at a local recycler. Uh this is the loading dock where you will be walking up to and delivering it. What do you say when you walk up to the counter. We have something to deliver for you guys is an old monitor just like act like a customer and you're that's it.
[3:12]This recycler, which we're not naming, has been caught exporting waste in the past and Ban wants to check up on them. Yeah, it's dropping it off for recycling. Yeah, you like a receipt? Uh yes, please. You have an email right up here. Okay.
[3:26]Is that easy? That was incredibly easy. Yeah. What email address did you put in? Uh my personal email address. Okay. Not my work email address. That was going to say. Afterwards, Band sent me up with their in-house software called Earth Eye, so I could follow the monitor's trail. As we were working on this video, I could see it had traveled miles outside of Seattle to an e-waste processing facility. Using Earth Eye, Band has track the spread of e-waste all over the planet. We have two trackers here. One that ended up in Hong Kong and one that ended up in Thailand. As we zoom in, it just looks like a farmland. Keep zooming in. And you see all this trash right here. This black part is I believe from the sludge from actually um burning and handling this material. Again, exporting electronics is not against the law in the US, but with the help of investigators, ban is still managed to send some unethical recyclers to prison.
[4:32]Wow, the total reclaim story goes way back. In 2002, fan produced a documentary about e-waste exported to China and they interviewed recycler about their practices. And the only one that would talk to us was Craig Lorge to talk reclaim.
[4:49]And we put him in our film as being a good guy that was concerned about the export that he still had to do some exporting but he didn't like to do it. The local recycler, total reclaim, eventually signed on to band certification. making they pledge to recycle ethically. So he became over the years our poster child of the good recycle. Lord even appeared in the ban documentary complaining about unprincipled recyclers. You're charging on the front side, you're selling the material on the back side offshore. You don't do any work in between. You just arrange to have the material loaded into a shipping container and shipped. It's all about the money. But in 2015, we're working on a track report, ban noticed waste flowing from Oregon to total reclaim in Washington. It made its way to Seattle's American. We're just really so close. It's amazing. Then the track across the Pacific to Hong Kong. And we were shocked. We were just like, whoa, these things do not lie. What's going on with total reclaim our poster child of the good guys? Band's report drew the attention of state and federal investigators. As assistant US attorney Seth Wilkinson explains, total reclaim broke the law by lying to their customers. In this case, we don't have a federal law that specifically prohibits sending things overseas, sending this material overseas. We do have is federal laws that makes it illegal to commit fraud, to make material misrepresentations about something in order to get money. And the more digging investigators did, the more fabrication that turned up. Total reclaim initially said, oh, there must be some mistake. We don't send flat screen monitors to Asia. Um and they said what we do do is we send plastic to Asia. And they said what must have happened is that one of the GPS devices must have fallen out of a monitor, fallen into a bin of plastic and been transported over to Asia. And to back that false narrative up, they created a bunch of false documents.
[6:50]Put traveled to Hong Kong where he found total reclaims discarded LCD monitors and workers who could have been poisoned by them. Eventually, total reclaims fest up, the founders were charged with fraud. The defenders are charged with one count of conspiracy in violation of title 18, United States Code section 371. The founders agreed to a plea deal and were each sentenced to 28 months in prison. So ban system worked. Although for pocket, it hardly felt like a relief. Probably one of the most troubling things I've experienced in this business of being an advocate was getting a real ally and then find out that you're betrayed by that.
[7:33]It's going to be hard to picture just how much of the stuff recycler have to deal with. So we visited a local business called friendly earth, which says it's trying to handle the work responsibly. Like total reclaim was supposed to. This is what it looks like when you first get that. This is, yeah, this is a a a pretty good example of it. Um you're going to see a mix of, you know, circuit loose circuit boards, uh plenty of wire, plenty of cabling. Uh maybe a maybe a desktop or two. This one looks like it's seen better days. The company takes in thousands of pounds of electronics a day around Washington. It refineries what it can and sends the rest to other companies to be broken down further. We are small in comparison to a lot of the recyclers out there that have uh shredders or you know um fleet of 20 to 30 trucks, um or maybe 7 to 10, 12, 15 locations across the world. We we're growing, but we're growing organically. Um, and we're doing it, you know, the right way.
[8:40]For a lot of Americans, the effects of E-waste can seem so far away that they're hard to grasp. But the way our electronics are recycled matters. Federal legislation to reform E-waste exporting has been on the table for years, but keeps slipping away. Meanwhile, the damage that's happening is real. Pollution, it does harm people. Nobody quantifies it and it's really hard to quantify how many deaths or disease. But it is a form of murder. Um when people die from this and they'll die prematurely, the data supports the fact that these pollutants do cause death and disease. By contrast, proper recycling is more expensive, but it is doable. So by the numbers, none of this really had to happen. Each of the owners of total reclaim uh took home almost $8 million in income over the period that this was going on. It would have cost about $2.5 million um for them to do this properly. So perhaps instead of each of them making eight, they would have made 6 and a half million each.
