SEATTLE, WA - May 24 - Member organizations of the Computer TakeBack Campaign, supporting a critique prepared by the Basel Action Network on the recently released "Plug-In to Ecycling Guidelines for Materials Management," have denounced that policy document as being a "green-washing” of a disastrous environmental policy – and a band-aid over the growing global electronic waste cancer. The critique especially blasts the inability of EPA to take action to block the most egregious socially and environmentally devastating destinations where currently the vast majority of electronic waste in the USA goes: export to developing countries, dumping in municipal solid waste systems, or processing using prison labor.

"The United States is falling farther and farther behind the rest of the industrialized world with respect to managing electronics wastes in an environmentally responsible manner," said David Wood of the Grass Roots Recycling Network. "This latest attempt by the EPA to put some voluntary, non-binding, window dressing on a problem calling for decisive legislation, merely highlights the lack of leadership in Washington and in the corporate board rooms across America."

In contrast to the U.S., the European Union (EU) has for several years now banned the export of hazardous electronic wastes to developing countries. The EU recently passed legislation mandating phase-outs of toxic constituents in computers, as well as requiring all manufacturers selling electronic equipment in the European Union to take-back equipment at end-of-life and ensure its safe recycling. The United States is the only developed country in the world that fails to control the export of hazardous electronic waste at all, and furthermore has utterly failed in its attempts to devise a similar producer responsibility program for post-consumer electronic waste that will promote greener design of toxic electronic products. Only efforts taken by a growing number of State governments seem to be moving us closer to tackling the problem at its source. However it is clear with the new guidance document that the Administration is under pressure to appear to be doing something. While not all of the document met with activists' ire, the overall result has been slammed for being merely voluntary and even as such as being inappropriately toothless. The "Plug-In" Guidance Paper suffers from the following shortcomings:

• Dumping in Solid Waste Systems: It fails to call for halting the dumping of hazardous electronic wastes in landfills and incinerators -- once dumped this way into our municipal solid waste systems, the waste can contaminate our groundwater, and air.
• Prison Labor: It fails to address the environmental injustice of using prison populations to manage hazardous electronic waste and the fact that this use of captive labor undercuts the competitiveness of private sector recyclers
• Re-Use, Refurbishment Loophole: It opens up a loophole allowing completely free export as long as destinations of re-use or refurbishment are claimed
• Playing Games with Definitions: It fails to properly utilize internationally agreed-upon definitions of hazardous waste in the Basel Convention or OECD treaties and creates scientifically unsupportable uncontrolled designations for shredded circuit boards or crushed leaded glass.
• Export as Usual?: It fails to call for a principled halt to export of hazardous wastes to developing countries. However it does call for participating companies to respect the laws of importing and transit countries. The Basel Action Network notes that if this is taken seriously, 133 countries will presently be off-limits to US exporters.

"EPA and electronics manufacturers fiddle while computers get burned in China, dumped in our local landfills or hauled into prison sweatshops," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, author of the critique. "Once again we are given sound-effects instead of effectiveness. As electronics consumers and as global and US citizens we deserve far better than a voluntary call to -- perhaps, maybe, if you want to, do something, without doing, too much of, anything different, at all."

*Groups affiliated with this press release include:

Basel Action Network, Jim Puckett

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Ted Smith

Grass Roots Recycling Network, David Wood

Clean Water Action, Lynn Thorp

Natural Resources Council of Maine, Jon Hinck

Clean Water Fund , Lynn Thorp

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