<incom> High Tech Trash: An Interview with Elizabeth Grossman (by Sarah Rich) (Modified by geert lovink)

[geert lovink]

High Tech Trash: An Interview with Elizabeth Grossman
By Sarah Rich

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004610.html

In the grand scheme of things, the waste that weekly fills our curbside 
trash and recycling bins is mostly of a household variety: food 
containers, junk mail, used bathroom and cleaning supplies. We don’t 
throw out things like cell phones, computer parts and appliances very 
often, but when we do, this electronic waste ("e-waste") wreaks 
widespread havoc as it travels through a clumsy, poorly distributed 
global disassembly and decomposition process.

We've talked quite a bit at WC about emerging standards and legislation 
for better e-waste recycling, about corporate responsibility for taking 
back used products, about evolving design to make efficiency, 
upgrading, disassembly and remanufacturing simple. All of these efforts 
at progress are gaining acceptance and importance. But our planet is 
still being littered with the detritus of rapid technological progress 
-- one of those semi- (or mostly) hidden systems that persists largely 
because of its invisibility.

Environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman got a glimpse behind this 
curtain while researching point source pollution in the Willamette 
River in 2000. What she discovered was that over half that pollution 
came from high-tech industries -- chip manufacturers, silicone wafer 
manufacturers, and companies that make metals products for high tech 
were responsible for millions of gallons of solvents, nitrates and 
metals flowing down the river.

Grossman set out to investigate the systems that cart and dump high 
tech trash around the world. The result is the newly released High Tech 
Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health. It's not all 
digital doom and gloom, though. Grossman spends a great deal of time 
discussing the evolution of tech recycling, the advantages of mining 
circuit boards instead of natural landscapes, and possibilities for a 
cleaner, healthier tech industry. Her book ends with what she calls a 
Land Ethic for the Digital Age -- inspired by Aldo Leopold's momentous 
Land Ethic -- which points out that due to the nature of the industry, 
and the state of the world today, this is an issue in which we are all 
implicated. But because of the incredible speed and relative 
transparency of the digital world, we have before us the possibility 
for solutions to emerge and mature quickly and globally. As Grossman 
puts it:

"Technology is not going to solve anything on its own, but the fact 
that we’re using high tech to look at these problems, make people aware 
of the problems, and implement solutions, is actually going to help 
solve them, because the minute somebody publishes a report, or a 
solution becomes available, everyone can see it."

I sat down with Lizzie recently to talk about her book. Below is a 
transcript of our conversation:

SR: Over the course of the two years that you were working on it did 
you find that the information available on this was escalating pretty 
quickly? It seems that this is starting to peak…

EG: One of the really tricky things about working on the book is that I 
really almost instantly discovered that there were no books on the 
subject. There was only one collection of papers that was published 
after I started working on this. It was quite academic -- incredibly 
useful, but very academic, technical stuff. But otherwise, there is a 
huge amount of information out there but it is all written for peer 
review journals. It’s either scientific -- sort of on the toxic end of 
things -- or for engineers or professionals who are in high tech. I 
think there is going to be more and more information on it, but I think 
my book is the only one that’s tried to put this together for a general 
reading audience. There are bookshelves full of things on tech or the 
high tech business, but almost none of them talk about materials or 
manufacturing.

SR: Nothing about the beginning or end of life.

EG: No there is nothing about the end of life, absolutely nothing. 
There have been people Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition that have been 
tracking health impacts to workers for years, but I couldn’t find 
anything that was looking at the raw materials through end of life, so 
I just kind of had to put that together myself.

SR: In some of the promo material about your book, there's a comparison 
to Silent Spring; that this is the call to this cause. It makes a lot 
of sense to me that this is what you're doing - raising sort of the 
first eyebrows among consumers that this is something really dangerous.

EG: The place where I sort of found the Silent Spring comparison is 
that 40 years ago,
  when Silent Spring was published, there was this impression that we 
responded by saying, "Ok these terrible chemicals are out there; this 
isn’t going to happen again." And it's true, some of those chemicals 
were banned; but it turns out that even though they're not being 
actively used, they are still in the environment. The thing that I was 
so struck by was that we haven’t changed our practices. We’re still 
inventing new synthetic chemicals, putting them into mass production, 
putting them into consumer products without testing -- certainly not 
their long-term health and environmental impacts -- so the cycle is 
just perpetuating itself, while we have the impression that we kind of 
solved that problem and have moved on.

And the other thing that I was struck by in a historical timeframe was 
that high tech really started escalating and coming into its own in the 
1970s. So you can look back at the industrial age, mid 20th century 
business and industry, and say that we didn’t know about these impacts 
and we weren’t thinking about those things. But tech is something that 
came into its own in the 1970s and 1980s - that sort of environmental 
conscience has been raised at that point. Yet the profile of the 
industry was on what this stuff can do -- the cyber space, the virtual 
reality, the information processing -- completely divorced from the 
physical and natural world. And that's one of the things I wanted to do 
was to put high-tech electronics in an ecological context and connect 
them to their origins and the end of their lives in the natural world 
and how they interact with people physically, because we’ve just 
completely ignored that.

SR: I thought that was one of the greatest things about the book was 
how much the nature writer voice comes out. There are these beautiful 
descriptions of nature -- and even beautiful descriptions of piles of 
e-waste -- that are very poetic. I think it is effective in terms of 
your message and mission that you contextualize the complex issue 
within the beauty of the natural world.

EG: I think that was one of the hardest things about writing about this 
book. I remember at some points having all these notes and sitting down 
with some friends and thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to write 
about this because it’s so technical, and I got interested in this 
stuff because I like looking at the landscape and I care about it. All 
of a sudden I’m confronted with these mounds of chopped up plastic and 
landscapes that are completely industrial or they have big holes in the 
ground.

And I also think bringing in the health impacts and how this stuff 
affects people is really important. I didn’t have my camera, it broke 
while I was sort of out working on this, so I thought, I’m not going to 
be able to take a picture so I’m going to have to really write this 
down really carefully.

SR: Tell me about your experience in Sweden at the e-recycling plant.

EG: I went to visit a mining company called Boliden, which is up on the 
northern end of the Baltic about two hours from the Finnish border, and 
another hour and a half drive from the Artic circle, so you’re way up 
north. Boliden is a huge mining company. They have copper mines, zinc 
mines, silver, they actually do lead, as well. And the reason that I 
went to see them is not just because they do this mining but because 
they have discovered, like other mining companies, that old circuit 
boards are an incredibly concentrated and valuable source of copper and 
precious metals and other metals, as well. Actually the USGS has 
crunched some numbers and realized that a pile of circuit boards 
contains a far higher concentration of ore than the same quantity of 
raw ore would, and it’s obviously a lot less costly from every possible 
perspective to mine a bunch of old circuit boards than it is to dig it 
up out of the ground to begin with.

But what Boliden is doing and part of the reason why it was so 
interesting to go visit them, is that there's a Finnish company there 
that collects the used electronics and actually oversees the 
dismantling of the electronics. These are things that are collected all 
over northern Scandinavia and then transported to this plant which I 
visited. One interesting thing in Europe is that used electronics 
aren’t just computers and cell phones and televisions -- things with 
display screens -- its anything with a plug. So when you go to visit 
this place there are these huge bins with used appliances of every 
possible kind - everything from hair dryers to blenders, old stereo 
equipment and lamps, as well as computer equipment.
  They dismantle this stuff and segregate the different materials, and 
then the metal-bearing circuit boards end up getting chopped up and 
shredded into little bits, and then they sit out in these open yards 
and then get shoveled into conveyers and funnel into this enormous 
smelter along with raw ore. So there is this enormous cauldron, and 
from one side comes chopped up electronics, and the other side comes 
raw ore, and then it gets melted down and it looks like every film 
you’ve ever seen of boiling metal -- it gets poured into these ingots 
and processed so that the copper and the other metals are separated 
out. It's one of the only places where it's being done like that. And 
Scandinavia is one of the first regions that is actually collecting the 
electronics, so they’re a lot further along in the collection schemes.

SR: That is very interesting, and to some degree isn't happening in the 
US, too?

EG: HP has set up electronics recycling plants with Noranda – they're a 
Canadian company, but that’s who they’ve gone into business with and 
there are several others. But it’s the metals specialists that are 
driving this because right now – any recycler will tell you -- plastics 
are the hardest to recycle, For one thing, electronics entering the 
waste stream are older ones with lots of different kinds of plastics in 
them and apparently you can’t mingle this stuff and then use it again; 
and it kind of down cycles. I had a woman who works for Epson says to 
me, "I can make you flower pots or park benches but I can’t make you 
another printer cartridge or another computer with recycled plastic." 
So that’s the kind of thing they’re working on, but right now its the 
metals that are really valuable, not the plastic.

SR: We spend a lot of time talking about life cycle and disposal and 
cradle to cradle, but a lot of what I’ve been talking about with 
designers is the beginning point. I don’t know how much you spend doing 
on the beginning point because this has more to do with the very end. 
Where in that process from beginning to end you feel like things could 
change the most?

EG: I think it has to change at the very, very beginning. One of the 
problems that I discovered reading about high tech was that all of the 
waste products and the effluent of the manufacturing process include 
huge quantities of toxics. And in a way that's a design problem.

You have to figure out how you’re going to make products that never 
mind are just easier to dismantle and recycle, but also have longer 
lives, both physically and in terms of the technology; and being able 
to upgrade them so you don’t have to buy a whole new case every time 
you need something. And you have to actually make sure that you’re 
using not brand new virgin materials every time.

I think the trick, since most products out there today were designed 
without these impacts in mind, is that it's then a sort of retrofitting 
process. These things weren’t designed to come apart. I’ve had 
recyclers tell me it can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes to 
perform the initial disassembly. When I visited that recycling plant in 
Sweden, the whole place was littered -- and is a state of the art place 
-- but it was littered with little shards of metal and plastic and 
glass. That just means they’ve had to pry and force this stuff apart.

SR: Someone at Worldchanging just wrote about the pop apart cell phone. 
Is there anything like this in the works with other elements of 
electronics?

EG: If you delve down into various manufacturers' "design for the 
environment" pages, that’s been one of the big things -- reducing the 
number of fasteners, reducing the number of parts, and it’s not 
something any of us are going to do as consumers. It just means that 
you don’t need 6 different screwdrivers and a hammer to take something 
apart. And the trouble is that the stuff that people are really getting 
rid of in bulk now is the old stuff that wasn’t designed like this. 
Presumably, if you force manufacturers to have some responsibility for 
the end of life and their waste products, there's a huge incentive to 
change it. If you can just throw it away and forget about it, you won’t 
be compelled to change it.

SR: With any problem like this -- toxic materials and waste -- there’s 
the design issue and the manufacturer issue, and neither of those, like 
you said, is a consumer problem because we can't, as consumers, do 
anything about it except demand through our purchases. Do you agree?

EG: Change by way of demand through purchases is pretty slow to happen; 
it’s not like food -- that’s so immediate -- or something really simple 
like a paper product. This is so complex most people even don’t know 
what to demand. But there is rising consumer demand, and actually one 
of the places that consumer demand is having an influence is not so 
much on individual consumer purchases but institutional purchases. 
Schools, governments, and health care institutions buy huge numbers of 
computers and other IT equipment at once, and a lot of times when they 
buy it they ask for bids. How good a deal is the company going to make 
them? Increasingly, these companies also realize that the end of life 
poses liabilities for them not just environmentally but in terms of 
data. You don’t want your old data lying around in a landfill or on the 
side of a road somewhere. They’re asking to have takebacks as part of 
their purchasing agreements and their whole association of state 
purchasing agents -- I know this is so unglamorous – but state 
purchasing agents, and people who buy for universities and I think 
health care organizations are starting to ask for this, and that does 
really influence what the manufacturers do.

SR: So they want as part of their deal to have the company that sells 
it to them take it back from them so they don’t have to deal with the 
disposal.

EG: And that presumably involves some fee, but yeah, its part of the 
deal. When we’re ready to upgrade or buy new stuff, the seller has to 
service the end of life.

SR: Do you think that’s because of the hassle of disposing or because 
there is actually some concern over whether they would cause harm?

EG: People have become aware that it this an environmental hazard, but 
due to the way the laws work in this country, unless you have a local 
disposal ban on screens or something, you can throw this stuff in the 
trash. But if you’re a university and you’re getting rid of a dumpster 
full of it, that’s going to be hazardous waste. You can’t just dump 
this somewhere. It's expensive to get a service contract to recycle it 
because it’s a labor intensive process, so if you can, you include in 
your purchasing agreement with a large company that they’ll provide 
recycling as a service -- and it usually involves dealing with the data 
as well, because that’s become a concern. But as far as what else you 
can do to demand it, some places have started to put some pressure on 
local policy makers, but I think a lot of pressure has come from local 
governments because in this country, it’s local governments who are 
responsible for solid waste. And again, like large businesses and 
institutions, they’ve realized that it’s a liability and there has got 
to be a better way to deal with this.

SR: The other thing someone just wrote about on Worldchanging is the 
EPEAT program. What is your opinion of that?

EG: I have to say I think the federal government has been really 
dragging its feet terribly on dealing with all of this, and they keep 
completing new work groups and study forces. They have not been taking 
nearly as much leadership on this as they could and they have lots of 
reasons why they say they’re not. As to how effective what they’ve done 
thus far is, I just don’t know. I just think they’re moving way, way 
too slowly on this. They could be providing a lot more leadership.

I did go to an EPA-sponsored electronics summit and they were just kind 
of the facilitators, they weren’t really taking the leadership. And 
even if you look at their website, they are just a resource filter; 
they’re not taking a leading charge on it. I think under the current 
administration, there has been a lot of pressure put on them by 
business and private commerce departments, rather than from an 
environmental perspective. One of the things that the EPA has gotten 
involved in and is really badly needed is some kind of industry-wide 
certification program for recyclers. I can’t remember whether that 
comes under EPEAT heading or not. I don’t think so.

Because right now if you want to choose a recycler, you just have to 
ask them a lot of questions yourself about where the materials go and 
what kind of downstream tracking they have and whether they’re 
exporting it for cheap and unhealthy and unsound recycling. There are a 
few organizations, including Basel Action Network, that have come up 
with standards - the BAN one is probably the most comprehensive in 
terms of downstream tracking and export - but there isn’t anything that 
is sponsored by the government.

SR: Who do you think is the leader in the world right now for 
responsibly dealing with the waste and responsibly manufacturing 
computers?

EG: Well, Europe is way ahead of the US. The US is ridiculously behind. 
In fact it's kind of astonishing that we're so far behind on this. But 
I think it would be hard in terms of singling out one computer 
manufacturer as being an industry leader in this area because the 
business is so competitive. Wven though not very many people are 
choosing electronics based on an environmental profile, it’s part of 
successful international marketing. It's part of being a successful 
business to have as part of your profile that you’re a good global 
citizen. Whether it's true or not, or how deep it goes is something 
else, but that just has to be part of your profile and there has been a 
huge increase in transparency in the past 10 – 20 years on all of this. 
It is so competitive that when one large manufacturer moves, it's quite 
likely that others will follow. European legislation has been 
enormously influential in pushing the manufacturers. So I think it 
would be hard to pick out one true leader because they are all actually 
making constant improvements in design and materials. Where the motives 
come from are many and varied and it may not matter, but they’re all 
doing something, and realize that it's going to be good for business to 
keep making these improvements.

And here's a weird thing: In Europe there are all these eco labels; 
they all have them, but I just happened to look at Dell. In Europe they 
were advertising the fact that some of their printers and maybe some 
keyboards were particularly ergonomically friendly. Of course nobody 
sticks those kinds of labels on things in the U.S., so I really 
wondered, is Dell really making a different product that’s 
ergonomically friendly for Germany and Sweden but not for the US? No. 
They're the same product, it's just an advertising point. You actually 
have to dig pretty darn deep on anyone’s website whether its HP or Dell 
or Apple to find out what they’re doing, but they’re all doing 
something. When it comes to how any manufacturer-sponsored take back 
and recycling program works, that stuff varies hugely by geography and 
because they have to offer it in Europe and in Japan and some other 
countries, the manufacturers take back these products for no cost. The 
cost mechanism is somewhere else in the system. But in this country, 
you usually have to pay, or if you don’t have to pay, it's built in 
when you purchase a new piece of equipment. But you know consumer 
demand may make that change, too.

SR: In terms of also the fact that what we can do is upgrade instead of 
buy new things, do you feel like there are limitations in terms of how 
willing people are to upgrade?

EG: That seems to be one of the really knotty pieces of the whole 
problem. What usually prompts you to get a new computer? Well, because 
the one you have cannot, no matter what you do to it, use the latest 
software or the latest web technology or something like that. And the 
makers say, "Sorry, we can’t add anymore memory to it. We cant upgrade 
this anymore."

I got an email from someone who said they worked for Microsoft and 
wanted to know how culpable a software company is in promoting this 
rapid turnover of things, because, he said, hardware without software 
is like a musical instrument without a musician. And it's true, you 
can’t run a computer without software. I did not look at this for the 
book because I realized that software is a whole different issue, but 
if you don’t have software that is somehow designed in concert with the 
hardware, you will keep reaching that limit. I don’t actually know 
enough about how these things are designed and work in terms of the 
actual technology, but it seems like that is an important piece of the 
puzzle. I do know that Microsoft is working with some reuse 
organizations to provide software for refurbished and second use 
computers so that you’re not stuck having to acquire a new piece of 
equipment with its own licensed software in order to use it. That helps 
on one part of the equation, but it doesn’t solve the problem that all 
of a sudden you're going to have this leap forward.

Or the compatibility issue -- why is it that every time you buy a new 
computer you can’t use the same printer? And that is a software issue. 
How do you get around those competitive business models force you to 
keep tossing and buying more stuff in order to make everything work? I 
did ask the Intel people that and I thought they were going to laugh me 
out of the room. I said, "What’s going to happen when you realize you 
can’t keep doubling your computing capacity every 18 months and selling 
all this stuff at the same rate you did before?" And they said, "Yeah, 
that’s the $64,000 question." I thought they would just sort of laugh 
at me.

SR: The consumer psychology now is that we want the newest, latest 
thing; I wonder if someone will find a genius way to make the longer 
lasting product be the desireable choice.

EG: Well actually I was just talking about this the other day. I did an 
interview with a Chicago radio station and she talked to both me and 
Giles Slade who wrote a book called Made to Break which is a cultural 
history of planned obsolescence. I didn’t realize until I read his book 
that there were actually concerted campaigns right after WWI to make 
thrift a really bad thing. And we’ve got practically a century’s worth 
of the whole idea that to be a really successful American you need the 
newest, latest thing and you’re looked down upon if you’re using last 
years’ stuff. Technology didn’t make it happen, I think it exacerbated 
it and then it created a physical monster because of what this stuff is 
made out of.

SR: The last thing I want to ask is for you to describe for me the 
"Land Ethic for the Digital Age" that you present at the end of the 
book.

EG: Well that just came to me during these odd little off moments. I 
kept thinking about it because almost every time I went to a conference 
or I talked to people who were discussing end of life, e waste policy, 
they all kept saying we need to have a "level playing field." And that 
was code for one company or entity not having an unfair advantage; 
making sure that everybody was playing by the same rules and having to 
bear the same financial burden. There were a lot of complicated reasons 
why that came up, because some older companies have a lot more historic 
waste to deal with than ones that just popped up on the market. But I 
kept hearing the phrase ‘level playing field, level playing field’ and 
all of a sudden it occurred to me that instead of this meaning simply 
'no unfair advantages,' it would actually mean that we’re all in this 
together. And then all of a sudden I remembered Aldo Leopold’s Land 
Ethic, which is about interconnectedness and the fact that there is an 
evolutionary, biologically-determined need for people and the rest of 
the world to interact in an ecologically sound way, or you just won't 
survive.

So it occurred to me that you could translate that into how we're 
looking at this global technology, because one of the things that so 
impressed me about everything I learned is how global the business is. 
Raw materials, the profit, the manufacturing, how its marketed and even 
what happens to it at the end of life -- each one of those things 
happens at a global scale. So unlike any other business, all of this 
stuff is truly international. I kept hearing 'level playing field' and 
I thought, Well we really are all in this together, because you can’t 
divorce yourself from waste in China; its blowing in the air that 
crosses the Pacific and comes over here. And when you buy something, it 
was made in six different countries across the world with material that 
came from another dozen different countries. So that’s why it occurred 
to me that you could take that idea that were all in this together.

I also realized that there is this language of technology. You know, we 
have all these buttons - we have a command and control button, and I 
was struck by that arrogance of thinking we’ve divorced ourselves from 
the natural world and any responsibility for the ecological function by 
being in cyberspace. I don’t know exactly how you put it into practice, 
but the other thing that occurred was this: Technology is not going to 
solve anything on its own, but the fact that we’re using high tech to 
look at these problems, make people aware of the problems, and 
implement solutions, is actually going to help solve them, because the 
minute somebody publishes a report, or a solution becomes available, 
everyone can see it.

Plus, there is such an international cast of characters working on this 
issue and I don’t think that would have happened forty or fifty years 
ago with another industry. We're so American-centric here. I went to a 
conference in Beijing in 2004, and I think I was one of only four or 
five Americans there. There were people from literally every country 
and continent trying to figure out how solve these problems. So that’s 
when I realized it’s a global land ethic and as I said, I’m not exactly 
sure how you put it into practice if we could think about the fact that 
this is a totally global thing, and everyone is taking part in it, we 
therefore have some responsibility for it. And it does involve health 
impacts. It's not just that it's going to be ugly where someone else 
lives, but that by not asking for better designed products with fewer 
toxins, it's going to affect your kids here and the water you drink 
here, as well as stuff that happens to people thousands of miles away.