Computer waste can be a toxic mess
By Bill Lambrecht
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Saturday, Jun. 03 2006
ROLLA, MO.
When a man with a truck offered to "recycle" a load of old computer monitors in
2001, the University City School District was happy to pay him $5 apiece to be
rid of them.
So district officials were distressed to learn that some of its equipment has
turned up dumped in a once-idyllic place called Echo Valley amid stately
cottonwoods and spring daisies.
"When someone tells you they're going to dispose of them properly, you don't
expect them to come back and haunt you years later," said Daphne Dorsey,
spokeswoman for the district.
The dump, on private land north of Rolla, was abandoned in 2003 by Elmer
Dillard, a former electronics waste broker, according to court records and
interviews. He lost the land after failing to make payments.
Nearly three years later, the dump stands as a prime example of what can happen
in the digital age with recycling only voluntary and few rules governing where
computer junk and its hazardous components end up.
"It's the poster child," said Robert Geller, director of the Missouri
Department of Natural Resources hazardous-waste program.
The department has been overseeing a slow cleanup - too slow to suit neighbors
- that is being handled by another waste broker who had nothing to do with the
mess.
Meanwhile, computers that remain at Echo Valley tell a story of recycling
ignorance and good intentions gone awry. Tags on monitors reveal computer
owners as diverse as schools in Alton and Bethalto; Southern Illinois
University; the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services; and the
Missouri Botanical Garden, among others.
Still more computer junk at Echo Valley came from the University of Texas, the
Texas Department of Human Services and a school district in Irving, Texas, that
trumpets a commitment to advanced technology.
The institutions professed surprise - and a measure of embarrassment - about
the resting place of their electronic junk.
"That's not the way it's supposed to work. I feel like a pawn," said Rick
Durbin, technology director for Alton schools.
Charles Norwood handles computers for the Irving Independent School District in
Texas, which boasts of having supplied 9,500 of its students with laptops.
Norwood described a problem for computer users nearly everywhere: Seldom can
people be sure where their old units are headed.
"We get statements from recyclers saying they will dispose of them properly.
But what they do with them, we don't know. Because all we have is a piece of
paper," he said.
Meanwhile, others bear the burden.
"It was pretty here. Now it's an eyesore," said the Rev. Kerry High, pastor of
the Macedonia Baptist Church, which overlooks the dump at Echo Valley.
Race for solutions
Federal law prohibits businesses from disposing of large quantities of e-waste
in landfills. But in most states, including Missouri and Illinois,
landfill-dumping by others is tolerated.
Many people seek to donate old computer equipment, expecting it to be
refurbished and reused or, at the very least, properly recycled. Sometimes they
get their wishes.
But by most accounts, only a small fraction of computers are properly recycled.
Most are exported to Asia and Africa, which have few environmental safeguards
for handling the hazardous properties of electronic garbage.
With so much uncertainty, states and localities are struggling with what to do
with tens of millions of computers, televisions and cell phones - commonly
referred to as e-waste - that become obsolete every year.
Their task is made more difficult, planners say, by the federal government's
decision to support only voluntary solutions.
Thus far, four states - California, Washington, Maine and Maryland - have
enacted laws setting up funding mechanisms; six states have banned landfill
dumping of e-waste.
In Missouri, a group of recyclers and local planners, guided by the Department
of Natural Resources, will meet next week in Jefferson City for the third time
this year trying to carve out a compromise. For now, the so-called E-scrap
Stakeholder Workgroup has ruled out proposing a landfill ban.
In Illinois, a special commission last month recommended a landfill ban and a
statewide recycling plan with manufacturers and consumers sharing the cost.
Coming to grips with a burgeoning problem, planners have these concerns:
Pollution. Lead in the monitors - 6 to 8 pounds of it - is just one of threats.
E-waste also includes mercury and other unhealthful contaminants that might
leach from landfills, studies have shown.
Privacy. Retrieving personal information such as financial records and old
e-mails from discarded computers that haven't been wiped clean is "child's
play," as one expert put it.
Exports. Computer equipment often is exported to China, Nigeria and places
where labor costs make it more feasible for workers - sometimes children - to
disassemble computers and to extract minute amounts of gold and copper. The
Illinois commission reported last month that "unscrupulous recyclers export
used equipment to some of the world's poorest countries. There, unprotected
workers are exposed to toxic materials."
Laura Yates, of the St. Louis County Health Department, heads the St. Louis
Regional Partnership for Electronics Recovery, an alliance of local governments
seeking to promote recycling. Participants are the city of St. Louis, and St.
Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson counties.
The regional network began accepting e-waste at 10 sites in February in hopes
of keeping it out of landfills and away from countries ill-equipped to handle
hazardous substances. Part of the aim, Yates said, is stimulating a thriving
domestic market for the lead, plastics and precious metals removed from
electronic equipment when disassembled.
"Why are we sending all of our discards overseas so that someone else is
burdened with them?" she asked. "We want them to go to legitimate, viable
markets that don't involve 5-year-old children dipping circuit boards into
buckets of acid."
Nor does she want to see computers dumped in places like Echo Valley.
'He would just . . . dump them'
Echo Valley is about 10 miles north of Rolla near Highway 63 in a swath of
Ozark hills that once served as a horse farm.
According to neighbors, the land was donated by the late Bernard Sarchet, an
engineering management pioneer at the University of Missouri at Rolla, with the
intention of establishing a Bible camp.
Now, the land is strewn with computer monitors, piles of keyboards, plastic
casings, broken glass and knots of wiring, as if a tornado had struck a
computer warehouse.
According to allegations in a civil suit filed in Phelps County, Elmer Dillard,
of St. James, Mo., started bringing discarded computer gear to Echo Valley
after purchasing the land in 2000.
The original owners, John and Deborah Shook, who filed the suit, regained title
to the land in a court ruling after Dillard failed to make payments. They were
awarded a $4,000 court judgment - money they say Dillard never paid.
"People would pay him to haul away their computers, and he would just take them
out there and dump them," said John Shook, who estimated that more than 10,000
monitors were dumped, along with other electronic equipment.
The Shooks later sold the land at what they calculated was a substantial loss.
Dillard, who could not be reached for comment, has problems beyond his legacy
of dumping: He was implicated in U.S. District Court in St. Louis last month in
a scheme to defraud a state tax-credit program.
A St. Louis County lawyer pleaded guilty to mail fraud in the case, in which
Dillard allegedly permitted co-conspirators to use invoices from his Echo
Valley company to cheat the Rebuilding Communities Tax Credit Program. An
assistant U.S. attorney said in court that Dillard received "a kickback" for
his efforts. He has not been charged.
Missouri's Department of Natural Resources is permitting another company,
Midwest Recycling, to operate in a warehouse at Echo Valley under an agreement
that allows the company to bring in more electronic waste for recycling in
return for cleaning up the property.
John Roberts, 43, who operates Midwest, said that he has mixed tons of the
dumped materials with newly arriving e-waste components when seeking out scrap
yards and other buyers, some foreign.
"There could have been a whole lot of trouble avoided if this stuff would have
been recycled in the first place," he said.
Michael Menneke, a hazardous waste specialist with the Department of Natural
Resources, says Missouri has set no deadline for removing the hundreds of
computers that remain. He said that the most potentially dangerous materials
had been removed and that soil tests had showed no unhealthful lead levels.
"What you saw out there was a tremendous mess, but only about one-tenth as bad
as it was," he told a reporter who visited the site in April and May.
Menneke said the state decided that it would have been fruitless to pursue
other enforcement actions in the case. "This was the best solution for
everybody, to get it cleaned up," he said.
Computer tracking
Institutions chafe at the thought of their e-waste ending up scattered in
Missouri's rolling hills.
"Clearly, we don't dump our computers," said Peggy Lents, spokeswoman for the
Missouri Botanical Garden. The garden donates its old computers near and far,
from St. Louis-area schools to the countries of Tanzania and Madagascar.
She said the mid-1990s vintage monitor bearing the garden's identification that
a reporter saw at Echo Valley had to be one donated by the garden long ago.
In Illinois, equipment from the Department of Children and Family Services and
Southern Illinois University are shipped, like all surplus state property, to
the Department of Central Management Services in Springfield.
As it stands, Central Management is required to seek a financial return to
taxpayers, which means selling old computer equipment on the Internet or
auctioning it to the highest bidder.
But the agency's property control manager says Illinois is preparing to change
its system soon by hiring a single company that sees to it that computers are
wiped clean of sensitive data and properly recycled.
"We want to do what's socially responsible and environmentally friendly," said
Curtis Howard, property manager for the agency.
Texas universities and departments send their computer equipment to the state's
prison system for handling. University of Texas spokeswoman Marla Martinez
noted that the prison system has changed at least one of its practices: Before
selling old computers to brokers, tags identifying their origin are stripped.
Meanwhile, even computer programmers like Randy Scott, who lives across the
road from Echo Valley, wonder why Missouri hasn't been faster to respond.
"It seems like they sure have been slow," he said.
Added Tammy Snodgrass, of the Meramec Regional Planning Commission in St.
James, "We have been working really hard in our region to deal with dumping and
then someone does something like this."
blambrecht@post-dispatch.com 202-298-6880