Beware Electronics “Recyclers” that Don’t Recycle

7 January 2008 (Seattle, San Francisco) – In the wake of the Christmas electronic gadget buying season, with many of us buying new flat screen TVs, cell phones and computers now faced with disposing of the old ones, the Basel Action Network (BAN) and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) today cautioned consumers not to be fooled by the majority of businesses nationwide calling themselves electronics recyclers who in fact don’t do any recycling at all, but instead ship your old equipment to developing countries.

The Recycling Lie

“We may think we’re doing the right thing by giving our old electronics to a ‘recycler’ or a free collection event,” said Sarah Westervelt, BAN’s e-Stewardship Program Director. “But most of those businesses calling themselves recyclers are little more than international waste distributors. They take your old equipment for free, or pocket your recycling fee, and then simply load it into a sea-going container, and ship it to China, India or Nigeria.”

Once on foreign shores your old computer or TV becomes part of a cyber-age horror story. In China, woman and children breathe in the toxic solder vapors as they cook circuit boards, dioxins are produced when wires are burned, and micro-chips are washed in strong acid baths and flushed into the rivers as primitive metals extraction techniques take their toll on the local environment and the health of thousands of migrant farmers. In Nigeria the imported techno-trash that is not repairable is dumped and burned in swamps. BAN revealed these sad truths as early as 2002 in their film and report “Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia” and again in another report and film entitled “The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-use and Abuse to Africa," in 2005.

Unfortunately, according to BAN and ETBC, this ugly waste trade continues unabated from the United States because the government refuses to ratify the Basel Convention and the Basel Ban Amendment – international accords prohibiting trade in hazardous waste to developing countries, and has otherwise expressed little interest in controlling its toxic waste exports as long as they are claimed to be destined for recycling or re-use. As such, US e-waste exports are in contravention of international law, but not US law, and thus US “recyclers” are able to claim they abide by all environmental laws and are even "EPA approved".

Doing the Right Thing: The e-Stewards Initiative

To help distinguish between these unscrupulous exporters and the responsible recyclers and refurbishers, BAN and ETBC created the e-Stewards Initiative – a program identifying North America’s most responsible e-Waste recyclers that have agreed to adhere to strict criteria created by the non-profit environmental groups. The criteria require that no hazardous electronics equipment or parts (as defined internationally) will be exported to developing countries or be processed by captive prison labor, and that none of it will end up in landfills or incinerators. These responsible recyclers can be found at: www.ban.org/pledge1.html or www.computertakeback.com/responsible_recycling/index.cfm.

Consumers are urged to avoid recyclers not on this list including free e-waste collection events that do not state that they only use e-Stewards recyclers.

“We strongly urge all consumers to avoid all but those recyclers that have qualified as e-Stewards. If your local recycler has not qualified for the program, ask them to do so. Otherwise while trying to do the right thing with recycling, you can unwittingly become a player in a global digital dumping game, and end up poisoning those in developing countries,” said Barbara Kyle, National Coordinator of ETBC.

For more information contact:

Sarah Westervelt at BAN in Seattle: 1.206.652.5555, or swestervelt@ban.org.Barbara Kyle at ETBC in San Francisco: 1.415.206.9595, or bkyle@etakeback.org.

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is partially funding the construction of six such cellulosic biorefineries, estimated to cost a total of $1.2 billion. The first to be built will be the Range Fuels Biorefinery in Soperton, Ga., which will process wood waste from the timber industry into biofuels and chemicals. The DOE is providing an initial $50 million to start construction.

"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."

In fact, Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles. Of course, this estimate also relies on using the leftover parts of the grass itself as fuel for the biorefinery. "The lignin in the plant cell walls can be burned," Vogel says.

The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.

But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. "To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization," he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. "Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber."

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The wrong choice for Massachusetts

James Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This column is his personal opinion.

THE EARTH is close to passing climate change "tipping points." Greenhouse gases released in burning fossil fuels are nearing a level that will set in motion dangerous effects, many irreversible, including extermination of countless species, ice sheet disintegration and sea-level rise, and intensified regional climate extremes.

As a society we face a stark choice. Move on to the next phase of the industrial revolution, preserving and restoring wonders of the natural world, while maintaining and expanding benefits of advanced technology. Or ignore the problem, sentencing humanity and other creatures to struggle on an increasingly desolate planet. Massachusetts is on the cusp of making this choice, and, barring citizen objections, is in danger of making the wrong choice on two counts.

Energy legislation in the state Senate would reshape rules designed to encourage renewable energies, modifying them to encourage energy generation from coal. A proposed amendment to the "Green Communities Act" - in most respects a good piece of legislation - provides incentives for coal gasification technologies without requiring carbon capture and sequestration. If passed, Massachusetts would be promoting projects that increase greenhouse gas emissions, just when we need to reduce emissions!

Meanwhile, the Department of Environmental Protection granted draft approval and is poised to grant final approval to a project extending the life of an 80-year-old coal plant with coal gasification that would not capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions. Prolonging the life of NRG Energy's coal-fired power plant in Somerset would be a tragic mistake. This plant was scheduled to shut down in January of 2010 or to "repower" as a new cleaner plant. NRG now proposes to do neither. Instead, it wants to retain its dependence on dirty fuel, converting the plant's boiler to "plasma gasification" of coal.

NRG and state officials have resisted a comprehensive environmental review, demanded by environmental groups like the Conservation Law Foundation, which would compare the greenhouse gases that NRG's proposal is expected to emit over its extended lifetime with other scenarios, including a complete shutdown. The Somerset project should not be rushed through without full environmental review.

If the wonders of nature, our coastlines, and our social and economic well being are to be preserved, our society must begin phasing out coal use until and unless the carbon dioxide emissions are captured and stored. Continuing to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture will lock in future climate disasters for our children and grandchildren.

The people of Massachusetts took great risk, for the sake of themselves and their progeny, when they drew a line with the British at Lexington and Concord. It is time for a line to be drawn with the powerful special interests, who reap profits from our fossil-fuel addiction.

Changing the course dictated by fossil-fuel interests will not be easy. It requires leadership to define a path with increased support for energy efficiency and clean-energy sources. But this is what citizens must demand, as they tell their government to say no to coal.

The alternative is to shrink from personal responsibility and allow the pleadings and misinformation of special interests, driven by motives of short-term profit, to determine government actions.

But is that a picture of our generation we dare leave for our children, a picture of timidity in the face of special-interest greed?

We live in a democracy. Policies represent our collective will. We cannot blame others. If we allow the planet to pass tipping points, to set in motion irreversible changes to the detriment of nature and humanity, it will be hard to explain our role to future generations.

Today, the citizens of Massachusetts have two opportunities to change this course: first, by contacting legislators and demanding rejection of attempts to subsidize coal through legislation that mistakenly treats coal gasification as a "clean energy" technology; second, by demanding that NRG Energy be held to its original commitment to shut down or repower as a truly new and clean plant.

This is an opportunity for citizens of Massachusetts to exercise leadership again, taking bold actions to oppose entrenched special interests and helping initiate change that is essential if we are to retain a hospitable climate and a prosperous future for our children.

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Virtual Recycling Arrives in America

Following the amazing success and demand from the virtual recycling site Vskips in England – Vdumpsters has been launched in the US. http://www.vdumpster.com/

Covering every State and County, users can create their own virtual dumpster and put whatever they want into it to give away. This puts whole new meaning on dumpster diving as you can do it from the comfort of your own home, business or in fact any organisation or person.

The idea is to promote the reusing and recycling of people’s unwanted items.The main benefit environmentally is the reduction in land fill or stuff just being dumped when there is always someone who may want your “unwanted items;” as the old saying goes “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.

Disposing of waste into landfill sites is detrimental to the natural environment around us. Conservation of natural resources is important for all future generations. It is estimated that over 400 million tons of waste was disposed into United States landfills in recent year and the situation is likely to be much worse. If this continues, we are likely to bury ourselves under a suffocating pile of landfill waste.

The fact of the matter is that much of it isn't really "trash" at all, but is good stuff that could be given a new home, reused or recycled. Computers, TVs, Antiques, Garden Tools, Wood, Toys, Bicycles, Musical Instruments - you name it, we dump it, and it all has an impact on the environment.

Your support of vDumpsters keeps stuff out of landfill, helping to protect your environment from further damage. Instead of using a real dumpster first, upload your unwanted items to a virtual dumpster (vDumpster) and then dive and claim other people's items for free.

Totally free to use, Virtual dumpster diving is set to become a national fun event, helping people to help each other and helping to protect their environment – what could be better.

Why China Is Rising and the United States Is Declining

By Lester R. Brown

I know Santa Claus is Chinese because each Christmas morning after all the gifts are unwrapped and things settle down I systematically go through the presents to see where they are made. The results are almost always the same: roughly 70 percent are from China. After some research, it seems that my one-family survey is representative of the country as a whole.

Let’s start with toys. Some 80 percent of the toys sold in the United States--from Barbie dolls to video games--are made in China. Talking toys that speak English learned the language from Chinese workers. Electronic goods--from Apple’s iPod to Microsoft’s Xbox--are made in China. Clothing--from the latest cashmere sweaters to gym suits--is also likely to have a "Made in China" label.

The Christmas tree itself may come from China. While real Christmas trees are grown in every state in the United States and are marketed locally, many families now gather around artificial Christmas trees. Eight out of every 10 artificial Christmas trees sold in the United States are made in China. Last year Americans spent over $130 million on plastic Christmas trees from China.

This year Americans will spend over $1 billion on Christmas ornaments from China. And in perhaps the greatest irony of all, even nativity scenes are made in China. Last year Americans spent more than $39 million buying nativity scenes shipped in from the East. China’s success in attracting foreign investment capital and mobilizing this huge workforce has made it the workshop of the world.

That the U.S. Christmas is made in China is a metaphor for a far deeper set of economic issues affecting the United States. Today Christmas is celebrated in both the United States and China--but for different reasons and with far different economic consequences. For the Chinese, the manufacturing bonanza means record profits, rising incomes, and, in a society where people save some 40 percent of their income, a sharp jump in savings. In the United States, Christmas shopping expenditures, headed for another record high this year, contribute to rising credit card debt and a soaring trade deficit.

Underneath the American Christmas spirit and good cheer is a debt-laden society that appears to have lost its way, marred in the quicksand of consumerism. As a society, we seem to have forgotten how to save so we can invest in a better future. Instead of leaving our children a promising economic future, we are bequeathing them the largest debt burden of any generation in history.

At the personal level, credit card debt just keeps climbing, and at the government level, we have the largest deficit in history. At the international level, we have a trade deficit that moves to a new high month after month.

It’s not the fact that our Christmas is made in China, but rather the mindset that has led to it that is most disturbing. We want to consume no matter what. We want to spend now and let our children pay. It is this same mindset that introduces tax cuts while waging a costly war. Economic sacrifice is no longer part of our vocabulary. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt banned the sale of private cars in order to mobilize the manufacturing capacity and engineering skills of the U.S. automobile industry to build tanks and planes. In contrast, after 9/11, President Bush urged us to go shopping.

In the United States we are so intent on consuming that personal savings have virtually disappeared. We have an average of five credit cards for every man, woman, and child. Of the 145 million cardholders, only 55 million clear their accounts each month. The other 90 million cannot seem to catch up and are paying steep interest rates on their remaining balance. Millions of people are so deeply in debt that they may remain indebted for life.

The official national debt, the product of years of fiscal deficits, now totals $8.5 trillion--some $64,000 per taxpayer.

By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, this figure is projected to reach a staggering $9.4 trillion. We are digging a fiscal black hole and sinking deeper and deeper into it.

Each month the Treasury covers the fiscal deficit by auctioning off securities. The two leading international buyers of U.S. Treasury securities are Japan and China. In this role, China is now also becoming our banker. This developing country, where income levels are one sixth those of the United States, is financing the excesses of an affluent industrial society. What’s wrong with this picture?

In times past, when our fiscal deficits were covered largely by U.S. lenders, interest payments on the debt were reinvested in the United States. Now they are flowing abroad to Japan, China, and other foreign holders of U.S. debt.

While the U.S. fiscal deficit, driven partly by the war in Iraq, soars to stratospheric levels, the country is facing an unprecedented fiscal challenge as the baby boomer generation retires, pushing up the costs of social security, Medicaid, and Medicare. This, combined with the growing interest payments on our debt to China and other countries, will put a nearly impossible tax burden on the next generation--something for which they may never forgive us.

The U.S. trade deficit is growing by leaps and bounds, nearly doubling from $452 billion in 2000 to an estimated $850 billion in 2006. Rising oil imports and the trade deficit with China account for over half of it.

National policy failures such as not adequately supporting the use of renewable energy technologies have contributed to the growing U.S. trade deficit. For example, the United States should be a leading manufacturer and exporter of solar cells and wind turbines, but it has fallen behind both Europe and Japan. The solar cell, invented at Bell Labs in 1954, is an American technology. But the U.S. effort to develop solar energy was so weak and sporadic that both Germany and Japan forged ahead and developed robust solar cell manufacturing and export industries.

The situation is similar with wind. Although the modern wind industry was born in California at the beginning of the 1980s, the U.S. failure to sustain support for wind resource development allowed European countries to largely take over this industry.

Even though rising oil imports are widening our trade deficit, we consume oil with abandon, weakening the economy and undermining our political independence.

We have lost influence in world financial markets simply because of our mounting debt, much of it held by other countries. If China’s leaders ever become convinced that the dollar is headed continuously downward and they decide to dump their dollar holdings, the dollar could collapse.

Beholden to other countries for oil and to finance our debt, the United States is fast losing its leadership role in the world. The question we are facing is not simply whether our Christmas is made in China, but more fundamentally whether we can restore the discipline and values that made us a great nation--a nation the world admired, respected, and emulated. This is not something that Santa Claus can deliver, not even a Chinese Santa Claus. This is something only we can do.

# # #

Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

Data and additional resources at www.earthpolicy.org.

Cumulative Oil & Gas Contributions to Senators

Cumulative Oil & Gas Contributions to Senators Voting to Block a Measure to Rollback Oil Company Giveaways on HR 6

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

SENATOR OIL & GAS CONTRIBUTIONS

over past 4 years

Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) - $577,556

John Cornyn (R-TX) - $561,380

Bob Corker (R-TN) - $215,350

Pat Roberts (R-KS) - $205,850

James Inhofe (R-OK) - $196,700

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) - $150,500

Pete Domenici (R-NM) - $145,950

Jon Kyl (R-AZ) - $140,700

Mary Landrieu (D-LA) - $133,650 (the only dem to vote against)

Christopher Bond (R-MO) - $129,350

Sam Brownback (R-KS) - $129,155

Trent Lott (R-MS) - $124,300

George Voinovich (R-OH) - $122,050

Arlen Specter (R-PA) - $119,878

Lamar Alexander (R-TN) - $98,300

Jim Bunning (R-KY) - $98,269

John Ensign (R-NV) - $95,100

David Vitter (R-LA) - $81,100

Michael Crapo (R-ID) - $63,650

Jeff Sessions (R-AL) - $58,800

Robert Bennett (R-UT) - $58,700

Thad Cochran (R-MS) - $58,500

Richard Shelby (R-AL) - $56,800

Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) - $53,400

Ted Stevens (R-AK) - $44,700

Michael Enzi (R-WY) - $42,500

John Sununu (R-NH) $- 41,900

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) - $41,250

Larry Craig (R-ID) - $33,500

Judd Gregg (R-NH) - $31,500

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) - $29,600

Richard Burr (R-NC) - $28,750

John Barrasso (R-WY) - $27,500

Johnny Isakson (R-GA) - $25,200

Jim DeMint (R-SC) - $23,722

Mel Martinez (R-FL) - $17,000

Chuck Hagel (R-NE) - $16,600

Tom Coburn (R-OK) - $9,600

John Warner (R-VA) - $9,500

Wayne Allard (R-CO) - $0*

Total $4,097,810

*Sen. Allard was last re-elected in 2002 and will be retiring in 2008

Turning Carbon Dioxide into Fuel

Researchers are harnessing solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which can be used to make fuels.

Could concentrated solar energy be used to reverse combustion and convert carbon dioxide back into gasoline? That's what scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, aim to find out by building a novel reactor that can chemically "reenergize" carbon dioxide.

The device uses a two-stage thermochemical reaction to break down carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide, says Nathan Siegel, a senior member of technical staffat Sandia's Solar Technologies Department and one of the researchers developing the technology. "Carbon dioxide is a combustion product, so what we're doing is reversing combustion," he says. The carbon monoxide can then readily be employed to produce a range of different fuels, including hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline, using conventional technologies.

Within the Sandia reactor, invented by Sandia researcher Rich Diver, is a ring of a cobalt-ferrite ceramic material, which is essentially made up of iron oxide and cobalt. A parabolic solar concentrator directs sunlight onto the ceramic material, heating it to around 1,500 °C and causing it to give up oxygen.


As the ring continually rotates, the reduced material passes into a second, separate chamber containing carbon dioxide. Having given up its oxygen, the ceramic reacts with the carbon dioxide, stealing oxygen atoms off it. The result is the production of carbon monoxide. The process is continuous, so that the oxidized ceramic once again passes back into the solar chamber where it is again reduced. "It will work with either carbon dioxide to make carbon monoxide or with water to make hydrogen," says Siegel.


At least that's the theory. The Sandia group has carried out proof of principle demonstrations of various stages of the device but has yet to show that they all work together. The team is building a prototype that will be ready for testing by late spring. "It's 95 percent built," says Siegel.


The cobalt-ferrite ceramic was originally developed in Japan and is easy to produce. To maximize its effect, the material is constructed into a matrix of crisscrossing one-millimeter-diameter rods. This has the effect of producing a high surface area with which to react with the carbon dioxide.


By next June, the researchers expect to have the reactor's performance mapped out, and if it does as well as they expect, a practical version could be available within five years.


"At the moment, we are looking at getting carbon dioxide from industrial sources," says Siegel. The real potential, however, is to capture carbon-dioxide emissions and reuse them as fuel. "We're also looking at ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the air," he says. This would allow the reactor to be mounted anywhere, sucking up the atmospheric greenhouse gas and turning it into fuel. However, Siegel stresses, this is at a much earlier stage of development.


Despite the huge potential, there is currently very little research into finding ways to harness solar energy to produce carbon monoxide from carbon dioxide, says Siegel. But such technology deals with two problems directly: putting carbon dioxide to good use, and finding a way to make the best of the sporadic nature of solar energy. "It offers a way to store this solar energy and use it when you want it," he says.


It's excellent work and, in principle, scientifically quite possible, says Christian Sattler, of the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Center, in Cologne. "The question is, at what efficiency?" he says. "How much energy does it take to carry out this reduction? It may be more efficient to use the solar energy for direct power production."

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

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