can you throw away lcd monitors made in china

E-waste, or electronic waste, consists of everything from scrapped TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners to that old desktop computer that may be collecting dust in your closet.

This may be one of the world’s largest informal recycling operations for electronic waste. In one family-run garage, workers seemed to specialize in sorting plastic from old televisions and cars into different baskets. “If this plastic cup has a hole in it, you throw it away,” said a man who ran the operation, pointing to a pink plastic mug. “We take it and re-sell it.”

Studies by the Shantou University Medical College revealed that many children tested in Guiyu had higher than average levels of lead in their blood, which can stunt the development of the brain and central nervous system.

“Releases of mercury can occur during the dismantling of equipment such as flat screen displays,” wrote Greenpeace, in a report titled “Toxic Tech.” “Incineration or landfilling can also result in releases of mercury to the environment…that can bioaccumulate and biomagnify to high levels in food chains, particularly in fish.”

Several migrants said that while the work is tough, it allows them more freedom than working on factory lines where young children are not permitted to enter the premises and working hours are stringent.

Not that surprising considering that the latest food scandal to hit the country earlier this month is cadmium-laced rice. Officials in Guangzhou city, roughly 400 kilometers away from Guiyu, found high rates of cadmium in rice and rice products. According to the city’s Food and Drug Administration samples pulled from a local restaurant, food seller and two university canteens showed high levels of cadmium in rice and rice noodles. Officials did not specify how the contaminated rice entered the city’s food supply.

Guiyu, China, is the last stop for tens of millions of tons of discarded TVs, cell phones, batteries, computer monitors, and other types of electronic waste each year. In this area of Guangdong province in southeast China, the industry is characterized by thousands of small, family-run workshops interspersed with residences, schools, and stores. The workshops employ hundreds of thousands of local and migrant workers to extract copper, silver, gold, platinum, and other materials for resale, often burning or using acid baths to separate out the elements of interest. NIEHS-supported researcher Aimin Chen, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, is studying the impacts of e-waste recycling on pregnant women and their children in Guiyu.

With an estimated 20–50 million tons of e-waste produced annually worldwide, it is the fastest-growing stream of municipal solid waste. Management of e-waste is a significant environmental health concern. In developing countries, where most informal and primitive e-waste recycling occurs, workers and others who live near these recycling facilities are exposed to dangerous chemicals with potentially long-term adverse health effects. Other locations where such recycling is prevalent include India and Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria in Africa.

Huo has conducted her own research on children in Guiyu since 2004. She said she became aware of the potential problems associated with e-waste recycling after joining the faculty at Shantou, about 40 kilometers away from Guiyu, in 1998. A memory of two small children swimming in a highly polluted stream in Guiyu stays with her more than a decade later. In addition to focusing on children because of their developmental issues, studying the workers is also difficult, she said, because they move frequently from workshop to workshop, and even between Guiyu and their homes elsewhere in China. Also, employers are often reluctant to allow researchers to enter their facilities and slow down the work, she said.

There are some small signs that improved awareness and knowledge of the hazards can lead to improvement. For example, Huo said Guiyu local authorities published a decree in 2012 to ban burning e-waste and soaking it in sulfuric acids, and have promised greater supervision and fines for offenses. She also said that 2012 was the second year since 2004 that concentrations of metal, especially lead, decreased in the children studied. (They attribute the other year of decline—2009—to the global financial crisis that resulted in smaller volume of materials recycled.) Still, much remains to be done in Guiyu and worldwide. Increased awareness of this issue among global consumers, evidence-based interventions, and policy changes will be important to reduce the burden of disease among children and adults working in the e-waste recycling trade.

“Having this group review the current situation of e-waste exposure in children, identify research gaps, and highlight successful interventions and strategies will help us determine our next steps,” she said in opening remarks to the participants via a prerecorded video. “E-waste and the impact that it can have on health is a major topic of concern for all of you and for us at NIEHS, especially the impact it has on pregnant women and young children living so close to e-waste recycling sites.”

Technology is constantly evolving, bringing us new and better devices that leave us questioning what we ever thought was so great about those old ones in the first place. Last year’s mobile phones, TVs, and computers that use LCD screens are now dated by ever-improving models and a better grade of LCD – so replacing and upgrading the technology is important.

So, what should we do with these old devices and LCD hardware with a lifespan of 10-20 years that we now have lying sad and forgotten in the corner, in the attic, or out on the curb? Recycle them, of course! LCDs have their own regulations for recycling, so here are some tips on how to recycle your old LCD screens and devices.

LCDs that were manufactured before 2009 use cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs) to backlight the display. These CCFL displays contain mercury, which makes them hazardous to dispose of or incinerate. Other electronic products can contain hazardous chemicals, such as heavy metals and brominated flame retardants. These materials can leak out of landfills and into groundwater, streams, etc., or can be transformed into “super toxicants” while being incinerated. Throwing away these types of devices can clearly be harmful, even today. There are still some harmful chemicals and materials inside electronic devices that will damage the environment if they aren’t disposed of properly—and many times, they aren’t.

Another big problem is that because of the turn-over rate of these electronic devices, LCD screens are just left sitting in landfills. Since they need to be disposed of in certain ways, they’re left to sit and waste away, taking up space in the landfills. Many states have laws prohibiting the disposal of electronic waste in landfills. Because of that, LCDs are likely to sit and rot, or be incinerated in large quantities. They also could be shipped off to other countries that don’t have these prohibiting laws, which is definitely not the best solution to the problem.

Many times, we get new and better gadgets before the current one even needs replacing. That old TV still works, still shows the picture clearly and there’s not a scratch on it. But this new one…well, it’s bigger. It has the Internet capabilities built right in and it can do backflips! Okay, not really, but the point is that we tend to get something new while we still have a perfectly functioning, but slightly older, model. Instead of keeping it in the attic, you can donate it or recycle it to companies and stores in your area that will take it. These places can resell it to people who don’t have the latest backflipping TV, mobile phone or tablet.

Throwing away functioning devices is wasteful when it can be used and appreciated by someone else. With cellphones, some carriers have donation boxes where you can donate your old, still working cellphone to less fortunate people and families. This is environmentally, economically and morally friendly.

One option for a truly broken product is to take it to an electronics shop or store to see if it can be refurbished. Instead of claiming a lost cause when a screen breaks, see if it can be fixed. Apple has a service where they will take your old and broken phone and use it as part of the study to help improve the next product they’re trying to create.

Since the issue was raised, there has been much research performed on the best method for recycling LCD screens. Different facilities have different ideas, practices and processes. Some of these processes include removing the hazardous waste materials from the screens/monitors; others believe in completely taking apart the device/screen piece by piece and seeing what can be resold or refurbished, then disposing of the rest in environmentally friendly ways.

Almost 98% of an LCD monitor can be recycled. All plastics are removed to be recycled into new products. Printed circuit boards can be recovered from LCD recycling and smelted to recover valuable metals, while cabling is stripped to reclaim copper and other metals.

Considering how frequently we get new electronic devices, being smart about LCD recycling can make a huge difference. General Digital encourages all of its customers to recycle their used computer monitors and televisions. Learn more about e-cycling from Maryland’s Department of the Environment, and Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The Convention does not impose a complete ban on the international transfer of hazardous waste. The transfer may be allowed under certain conditions, for example, if the state of export does not have the technical capacity and the necessary facilities, capacity or suitable disposal sites in order to dispose of the wastes in question in an environmentally sound and efficient manner. The definition of some of these key terms, “technical capacity,” “necessary facilities,” “environmentally sound and efficient manners,” and “wastes required as raw material” can be rather controversial in practice. Different countries may understand differently what can be counted as “necessary facilities” and what varieties of materials should be seen as “e-waste.

Roughly 20 km away from Hong Kong’s slick, densely packed urban center lies the New Territories — a suburban mishmash of rugged hills and scruffy villages, soaring new housing developments and vacant lots.

BAN says that of all tracked items, 69 were exported, with 66 of those leaving the U.S. in possibly illicit fashion. While the U.S. has not ratified the Basel Convention, these exports are nevertheless illegal imports in their destinations, which have all ratified the convention. A rule governing exports of cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors in the U.S. also appeared to have been flouted, the report adds.

“It’s extremely expensive to do it right,” he explains, saying that recyclers saddled with items like monitors and computers could profit more from selling them to brokers scooping up e-waste instead of trying to properly dismantle them. Properly handling dangerous materials like mercury tubes takes considerable manual labor and cost.

In September, Total Reclaim was fined $444,000 by Washington State’s Department of Ecology for illegally exporting flat screens and monitors containing hazardous materials, reports Seattle-area PBS station KCTS, which also documented a trip to Hong Kong made by BAN investigators. The recycler’s e-Stewards certification has now been struck for two years.

Two weeks after BAN’s report was published, between late September and early October, a string of raids took place in Hung Lung Hang, a rural area just over a kilometer from the border and allegedly rife with illicit recycling facilities. The multiagency sting operation resulted in over 3,500 confiscated LCDs but no arrests, according to a government press release.

The EPD tells TIME in writing that it confiscated 150 tonnes of waste CRT monitors and 580 tonnes of waste LCD panels from 3,200 inspections of shipping containers between 2011 and 2015, resulting in 99 prosecutions for violations related to e-waste and over 80 convictions. It also says that, between August and September 2016, 10 containers of waste circuit boards had been intercepted and returned to their points of origin.

An attempt by TIME to visit “Mr. Lai’s Farm” found that an access road to the area had been completely sealed off with corrugated iron sheets. The area, peppered with container yards and low-density rural residential developments, appeared to be under construction work. A small pile of printers and LCDs was seen near a barrier.

“The key of the problem is not how strongly laws are enforced, but how customs can intercept [e-waste] at points of import,” he says. “When amending relevant laws, there needs to be a clear distinction between ‘e-waste’ and ‘second-hand electronics.’ That way, importers won’t be able to import e-waste under the pretext of ‘second-hand electronics.’”

Speedier customs clearance is another area where Hong Kong can do better, according to Chu. Under Hong Kong law, importers have up to 14 days to submit to customs an “accurate and complete import or export/re-export declaration.” That gives unscrupulous importers of electronic waste all the time they need to mask the true nature of what they are importing.

Last year, two inspectors from California’s hazardous waste agency were visiting an electronics recycling company near Fresno for a routine review of paperwork when they came across a warehouse the size of a football field, packed with tens of thousands of old computer monitors and televisions.

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big, glassy funnels inside these machines — known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs — were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them and creating what industry experts call a “glass tsunami” as stockpiles of the useless material accumulate across the country.

The predicament has highlighted how small changes in the marketplace can suddenly transform a product into a liability and demonstrates the difficulties that federal and state environmental regulators face in keeping up with these rapid shifts.

With so few buyers of the leaded glass from the old monitors and televisions, recyclers have collected payments from states and electronics companies to get rid of the old machines. A small number of recyclers have developed new technology for cleaning the lead from the tube glass, but the bulk of this waste is being stored, sent to landfills or smelters, or disposed of in other ways that experts say are environmentally destructive.

In 2004, recyclers were paid more than $200 a ton to provide glass from these monitors for use in new cathode ray tubes. The same companies now have to pay more than $200 a ton to get anyone to take the glass off their hands.

So instead of recycling the waste, many recyclers have been storing millions of the monitors in warehouses, according to industry officials and experts. The practice is sometimes illegal since there are federal limits on how long a company can house the tubes, which are environmentally dangerous. Each one can include up to eight pounds of lead.

ImageON THE TRAIL Members of an environmental group worked with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to place tracking devices in cathode ray tubes bound for American recycling companies.Credit...Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But now, there are only two plants in India doing this work.

In 2009, after television broadcasters turned off their analog signals nationwide in favor of digital, millions of people threw away their old televisions and replaced them with sleeker flat-screen models. Since then, thousands of pounds of old televisions and other electronic waste have been surreptitiously unloaded at landfills in Nevada and Ohio and on roadsides in California and Maine.

Cathode ray tubes have been largely replaced by flat panels that use fluorescent lights with highly toxic mercury in them, said Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy group. Used panel screens from LCD televisions and monitors, for example, do not have much recycling value, so many recyclers are sending them to landfills.

State and federal environmental policies have also become victims of their own success. Over the past decade, environmental regulators have promoted “take-back” programs to persuade people to hand in the more than 200 million old televisions and broken computer monitors that Americans are thought to have stored away in closets, garages and basements.

The same programs have courted businesses to divert their electronic waste away from landfills to avoid the hazardous chemicals in this toxic trash from leaching into groundwater. More than 290,000 tons of the high-tech castoffs are now directed away from landfills and toward recyclers each year.

Recyclers say there is still money to be made on processing the old monitors and televisions if companies charge a price that more genuinely reflects the expense of disposing of the glass properly. But practices like “greenwashing,” whereby companies pretend to engage in environmentally responsible disposal practices, hinder such progress.

“They’re skimming off the computers, cellphones and printers that can be recycled profitably because they have more precious metals,” said Karrie Gibson, the chief executive of Vintage Tech Recyclers. “Then they stockpile the CRTs, or dump it in landfills or abroad.”

The sheer quantity of the glass accumulating at some recycling plants has contributed to environmental and workplace safety problems. In Yuma, Ariz., for example, Dlubak Glass, one of the country’s largest recyclers of glass from televisions and monitors, found itself overwhelmed.

In September, California passed an emergency measure allowing companies to send monitors and televisions to hazardous landfills for the next two years.

“Right now, we can take PC, server, telephone, printer and household e-waste,” he wrote. “I cannot take your CRT/TV as e-waste because we don’t have equipment to recycle the tubes.”

Technology is becoming more and more integrated into every aspect of our lives. Semiconductors and sensors are being added to products that never before had them, creating wearable monitors, smart homes, TVs that can stream programming from the internet, and much more.

Meanwhile, the life span of devices is getting shorter—many products will be thrown away once their batteries die, to be replaced with new devices. Companies intentionally plan the obsolescence of their goods by updating the design or software and discontinuing support for older models, so that now it is usually cheaper and easier to buy a new product than to repair an old one. Meanwhile, the companies continue to profit from steady sales.

Electronic devices are made of a complex mix of materials that include gold, silver, copper, platinum, palladium, lithium, cobalt and other valuable elements. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says, “One metric ton of circuit boards can contain 40 to 800 times the amount of gold and 30 to 40 times the amount of copper mined from one metric ton of ore in the United States.” These precious materials can be reclaimed through recycling.

But electronic devices also comprise toxic heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium, polluting PVC plastic, and hazardous chemicals, such as brominated flame retardants, which can harm human health and the environment.

In 2016, the estimated value of recoverable materials in global e-waste was $64.6 billion, but only 20 percent of it was properly recycled to enable recovery of the valuable materials. Much of the rest is dumped in landfills where toxic chemicals can leach from the e-waste and end up contaminating the water supply.

At these informal recycling workshops, men, women and children recover valuable materials by burning devices to melt away non-valuable materials, using mercury and acids to recover gold, and dismantling devices by hand to reclaim other materials of value.

In addition to its health hazards, informal recycling can pose security risks, because while formal recyclers in the U.S. usually require wiping devices clean of data, informal recycling does not.

In order to reduce e-waste, manufacturers need to design electronics that are safer, and more durable, repairable and recyclable. Most importantly, this means using less toxic materials. Chemical engineers at Stanford University are developing the first fully biodegradable electronic circuit using natural dyes that dissolve in acid with a pH 100 times weaker than vinegar. One group of scientists is pulverizinge-waste into nanodust by cooling the various materials, then grinding them up into homogenous powders that are “easy to reuse.” Canada-based Ronin8  has developed a technology that uses minimal water and energy as it separates metals from non-metals through sonic vibrations in recycled water.

Today, it’s not a priority to design goods that can be reused or remanufactured, though for a few years, companies experimented with modular phones that enabled consumers to upgrade parts of their phones instead of having to entirely replace them. Google, LG and Motorola all released modular models, but they ultimately failed because they were clumsier and more costly, and because consumers expected their devices to come with every feature as standard. Perhaps as consumers become more aware of the e-waste problem, companies will be able to design a modular phone with more market appeal.

In addition to recycling, it’s also important to be able to repair and reuse the devices we have. But even if you know how to and want to repair your electronic device, you might be stymied because your product’s software is subject to copyright. The copyright often forbids consumers by law to tinker with or reverse-engineer the device or use an unauthorized repairer. Ifixit.org demands the right to repair devices and teaches people how to do it.

EcoATM provides a convenient and safe way to recycle and sell old cell phones, MP3 players and tablets. Consumers can bring their devices to one of 2,700 kiosks in the U.S. The EcoATM will evaluate it based on the model and condition, and pay you right there. The items are then either reused or responsibly recycled.

China’s largest internet company, Baidu, and the United Nations Development Programme developed a smartphone app called Baidu Recycle. Chinese users can indicate the item they want to recycle, enter its size, the date it’s to be picked up along with their name and address, then submit a photo of it. Within 24 hours, an accredited recycler comes to pick it up. In two months, 11,000 devices were recycled.

Nickolas Themelis, professor emeritus of earth and environmental engineering and director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, said that the best and only economical large-scale recycling being done in North America today uses a copper smelter in Canada. He explained that when e-waste is fed into the copper smelter, precious metals like silver, gold, platinum, palladium, selenium, and others dissolve in molten copper, which acts like a solvent at high temperatures. The impure copper (because it comprises other metals) that results is then sent to a refinery where pure copper is separated out and the other valuable metals can be collected. This integrated smelting process combined with refining, though it recovers only metals that dissolve in copper, is a relatively inexpensive method of reclaiming e-waste metals. The smelter, in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, receives about 50,000 tons of e-waste each year. “The model of Noranda with a small [e-waste] collection company in the U.S. and a larger one in Canada and a big smelter, could be done in other countries,” said Themelis. “It could be done in China which already has copper smelters, as well as in America.”

Using the example of cell phones, Kersten-Johnston explained how the electronics industry could move towards a circular economy. “Right now, over the length of the contract, you gradually buy outright the phone so the provider can recoup the cost of manufacturing that phone in the first place,” she said. “But at the end of the contract, you’re left with a phone that’s worth basically nothing, that you’ve had to pay for all that time and you can’t do anything with it. That’s a flawed model. But imagine a system where the provider or manufacturer retained ownership of the device through the contract so customers would pay a lower monthly fee and be expected to return the device for an upgrade. The value could be recaptured in the form of parts for remanufacture or materials for recycling, and customers would still get their upgrades.”

Kersten-Johnston believes it’s only a matter of time before this type of business model happens across the board because millennials and the younger generation don’t value ownership in the same way as previous generations, and they expect this type of responsible behavior from industry.

The best thing you can do is to resist buying a new device until you really need it. Try to get your old product repaired if possible and if it can’t be fixed, resell or recycle it responsibly.

Before you recycle your device, seal up any broken parts in separate containers so that hazardous chemicals don’t leak. Wear latex gloves and a mask if you’re handling something that’s broken.

Find a responsible recycler. Recyclers with the E-Steward label on their websites have been certified to meet the cleanest and most responsible standards for e-waste recycling. E-Steward recyclers also clear your data in their recycling process.

Growing e-waste problem is a paramount concern and most of the people are not aware of how they can contribute to reduce this problem. Your blog gives comprehensive details on what people can do to handle the e-waste growing issue. More and more readers can become familiar with the e-waste, its upsurge, the state of e-waste recycling and what they can do. Extremely informative blog.

I think collaboration between the governments of developed and developing countries can help humanity get rid of e-waste. Researchers should also try their best to develop ways to significantly or completely reduce the inclusion of toxic materials in electronic devices.

1-800-GOT-JUNK? offers an FAQ page on how to dispose of electronic waste. The resource goes over how to recycle electronics, the importance of properly disposing of electronic waste, and other need-to-know information before throwing away electronics.

yes, you are right. e-waste is a huge problem for an environment and also for humans. We have to be aware of that. Thanks for sharing important knowledge to everyone.

Hi! I’m living in South Africa Enquirer for knowledge and tips on how to start e waste In my country.i resides in rural areas where we are not exposed to e waste,we end up throwing away recycleble items

This is a very good article, however, in Nigeria where i reside, not only is the awareness about the dangers of e-wastes low, there is also no known e-wastes recycling plant in the country, so you can imagine the situation of things here. As a PHD student with interest in this area, i’ll like to know what steps to take beyond writing. Thanks

It’s good to know that E-products need to be recycled responsibly in the event that they can’t be repaired. My husband and want to start cleaning out some of the junk in our garage, including an old desktop computer that’s too far gone to be fixed. I’m glad I read your article so I can do the responsible thing and look for a computer recycling service in our area to give it to.

Hi Matthew, we do not own the images in this post — you’d have to reach out to the original creators, which are linked in the image captions. Best of luck with your book chapter!

Roughly 20 km away from Hong Kong’s slick, densely packed urban center lies the New Territories — a suburban mishmash of rugged hills and scruffy villages, soaring new housing developments and vacant lots.

BAN says that of all tracked items, 69 were exported, with 66 of those leaving the U.S. in possibly illicit fashion. While the U.S. has not ratified the Basel Convention, these exports are nevertheless illegal imports in their destinations, which have all ratified the convention. A rule governing exports of cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors in the U.S. also appeared to have been flouted, the report adds.

“It’s extremely expensive to do it right,” he explains, saying that recyclers saddled with items like monitors and computers could profit more from selling them to brokers scooping up e-waste instead of trying to properly dismantle them. Properly handling dangerous materials like mercury tubes takes considerable manual labor and cost.

In September, Total Reclaim was fined $444,000 by Washington State’s Department of Ecology for illegally exporting flat screens and monitors containing hazardous materials, reports Seattle-area PBS station KCTS, which also documented a trip to Hong Kong made by BAN investigators. The recycler’s e-Stewards certification has now been struck for two years.

Two weeks after BAN’s report was published, between late September and early October, a string of raids took place in Hung Lung Hang, a rural area just over a kilometer from the border and allegedly rife with illicit recycling facilities. The multiagency sting operation resulted in over 3,500 confiscated LCDs but no arrests, according to a government press release.

The EPD tells TIME in writing that it confiscated 150 tonnes of waste CRT monitors and 580 tonnes of waste LCD panels from 3,200 inspections of shipping containers between 2011 and 2015, resulting in 99 prosecutions for violations related to e-waste and over 80 convictions. It also says that, between August and September 2016, 10 containers of waste circuit boards had been intercepted and returned to their points of origin.

An attempt by TIME to visit “Mr. Lai’s Farm” found that an access road to the area had been completely sealed off with corrugated iron sheets. The area, peppered with container yards and low-density rural residential developments, appeared to be under construction work. A small pile of printers and LCDs was seen near a barrier.

“The key of the problem is not how strongly laws are enforced, but how customs can intercept [e-waste] at points of import,” he says. “When amending relevant laws, there needs to be a clear distinction between ‘e-waste’ and ‘second-hand electronics.’ That way, importers won’t be able to import e-waste under the pretext of ‘second-hand electronics.’”

Speedier customs clearance is another area where Hong Kong can do better, according to Chu. Under Hong Kong law, importers have up to 14 days to submit to customs an “accurate and complete import or export/re-export declaration.” That gives unscrupulous importers of electronic waste all the time they need to mask the true nature of what they are importing.

Last year, two inspectors from California’s hazardous waste agency were visiting an electronics recycling company near Fresno for a routine review of paperwork when they came across a warehouse the size of a football field, packed with tens of thousands of old computer monitors and televisions.

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big, glassy funnels inside these machines — known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs — were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them and creating what industry experts call a “glass tsunami” as stockpiles of the useless material accumulate across the country.

The predicament has highlighted how small changes in the marketplace can suddenly transform a product into a liability and demonstrates the difficulties that federal and state environmental regulators face in keeping up with these rapid shifts.

With so few buyers of the leaded glass from the old monitors and televisions, recyclers have collected payments from states and electronics companies to get rid of the old machines. A small number of recyclers have developed new technology for cleaning the lead from the tube glass, but the bulk of this waste is being stored, sent to landfills or smelters, or disposed of in other ways that experts say are environmentally destructive.

In 2004, recyclers were paid more than $200 a ton to provide glass from these monitors for use in new cathode ray tubes. The same companies now have to pay more than $200 a ton to get anyone to take the glass off their hands.

So instead of recycling the waste, many recyclers have been storing millions of the monitors in warehouses, according to industry officials and experts. The practice is sometimes illegal since there are federal limits on how long a company can house the tubes, which are environmentally dangerous. Each one can include up to eight pounds of lead.

ImageON THE TRAIL Members of an environmental group worked with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to place tracking devices in cathode ray tubes bound for American recycling companies.Credit...Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But now, there are only two plants in India doing this work.

In 2009, after television broadcasters turned off their analog signals nationwide in favor of digital, millions of people threw away their old televisions and replaced them with sleeker flat-screen models. Since then, thousands of pounds of old televisions and other electronic waste have been surreptitiously unloaded at landfills in Nevada and Ohio and on roadsides in California and Maine.

Cathode ray tubes have been largely replaced by flat panels that use fluorescent lights with highly toxic mercury in them, said Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy group. Used panel screens from LCD televisions and monitors, for example, do not have much recycling value, so many recyclers are sending them to landfills.

State and federal environmental policies have also become victims of their own success. Over the past decade, environmental regulators have promoted “take-back” programs to persuade people to hand in the more than 200 million old televisions and broken computer monitors that Americans are thought to have stored away in closets, garages and basements.

The same programs have courted businesses to divert their electronic waste away from landfills to avoid the hazardous chemicals in this toxic trash from leaching into groundwater. More than 290,000 tons of the high-tech castoffs are now directed away from landfills and toward recyclers each year.

Recyclers say there is still money to be made on processing the old monitors and televisions if companies charge a price that more genuinely reflects the expense of disposing of the glass properly. But practices like “greenwashing,” whereby companies pretend to engage in environmentally responsible disposal practices, hinder such progress.

“They’re skimming off the computers, cellphones and printers that can be recycled profitably because they have more precious metals,” said Karrie Gibson, the chief executive of Vintage Tech Recyclers. “Then they stockpile the CRTs, or dump it in landfills or abroad.”

The sheer quantity of the glass accumulating at some recycling plants has contributed to environmental and workplace safety problems. In Yuma, Ariz., for example, Dlubak Glass, one of the country’s largest recyclers of glass from televisions and monitors, found itself overwhelmed.

In September, California passed an emergency measure allowing companies to send monitors and televisions to hazardous landfills for the next two years.

“Right now, we can take PC, server, telephone, printer and household e-waste,” he wrote. “I cannot take your CRT/TV as e-waste because we don’t have equipment to recycle the tubes.”

In China the mountain of discarded TVs, phones, computers, monitors, e-toys and small appliances grew by 6.7m tonnes in 2015 alone. That’s an 107% increase in just five years. To get a sense of scale, if every woman, man and child in China had an old LCD monitor and dumped it the pile would not equal the 2015 tonnage. [1]

Although plenty of e-waste is recycled in Asia it’s mainly done by backyard businesses who resort to hammers and burning to access re-usable metals, resulting in local pollution and health impacts. Mobile phones, TVs, monitors, printers and other electronics contain hazardous materials such as mercury and lead. Ink toner from printers is also considered toxic.

The scale of e-waste exported to Asia has previously been difficult to estimate. BAN put GPS trackers inside old printers and monitors sent to recycling centres in the US last year to enable them to get a clearer picture. About 40% left the US with most ending up in Asia. Nearly all of these exports were illegal under US law. “Some of the trackers died so it’s likely 50% were exported,” Puckett said.

China, once a big importer of e-waste, has cracked down but Hong Kong has picked up the slack, with an estimated 100 containers of e-waste entering the port each day Puckett said. “There are at least a 100 small e-waste junk yards in a semi-rural part of Hong Kong called the New Territories. That’s where we found most of the printers and monitors with our trackers.”

Proper recycling of electronics is costly and expensive and is rarely done, even in the US. Manufacturers need to remove all toxins from their products and make them easier to repair and recycle, said Puckett. Another solution in Puckett’s view is to adopt a lease-based business model where people lease rather than buy most electronics, and use upgrades or trade-ins to get the latest features.[1] My estimate based on the average weight of a 17in LCD monitor – 4.5 kgs. So 220 monitors would weigh 1 tonne

You can return unwanted electronics to manufacturers for recycling or disposal for free. Electronic manufacturers, such as Samsung, Sony, or Toshiba, must accept electronics from residents at no cost. Cell phones can also be dropped off at any store that sells service plans.

You can find more information about recycling electronics at the store where you purchased the item or at any store that sells the item. You can also call the manufacturer or check your brand"s website.

Unlike your everyday consumer rubbish, electronics waste is especially challenging to deal with because it contains a range of hazardous substances. The world produced 41.8 million tonnes of waste electronics (e-waste) in 2014, according to the United Nations University’s

Li told chinadialogue that licensed disposal firms require production lines that meet national environment standards, and which use suitable technology to dismantle, discard and reuse waste, all whilst providing basic protections for employees. This means a single production line can cost tens of million yuan – leaving these firms at a huge disadvantage compared to smaller and more flexible informal traders.

Although the electronic product disposal fund subsidies formal recyclers, those subsidies are issued quarterly and can be late, sometimes by as much as a year.

Tong Xin indicated that the relationship between the informal and formal sectors is difficult for the government. If the informal sector is not brought under control there is no point in building up the formal sector, as it will not obtain any waste. However, taking jobs away from the informal sector will be just as diffucult.

If you are like many Westchester residents, you may have dozens of unwanted computer monitors, keyboards, printers, and old TVs around the house. These items are commonly refered to as e-waste, or electronic waste, and some of these items can cause harm if disposed in the trash. Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) – the primary component in old computer monitors and televisions – contain lead that can potentially contaminate land, air, and water resources.

If you have decided to get rid of e-waste, there are several options for environmentally-sound disposal in Westchester. First, think about donating any useable items, if possible.

To recycle your e-waste, visit the County"s Household Material Recovery Facility (H-MRF) which accepts a number of different types of electronic waste; including, cell phones, laptops, computers televisions and more. For a full list of accepted items that can be dropped off at the H-MRF, see the comprehensive list provided by EWaste+. Drop-offs are available for County residents by convenient appointment, Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

You can visit the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation"s Web site for a full list of the types of electronic equipment covered by this law and to learn how to properly manage your electronic waste in an environmentally-responsible manner.

Many Westchester County municipalities offer drop-off programs or curbside pickup for their residents. E-waste drop-off containers are located at some municipal DPW yards throughout the county. Contact your local Municipal Recycling Office for more details. You can also bring your e-waste to the Household Material Recovery Facility.

Other OptionsMany electronics retail centers and most manufacturers also offer take-back programs to their customers. You can learn more about each manufacturer’s plan through information provided by the New York State Department of Conservation or by visiting the manufacturer’s website. Also, be sure to check out the Environmental Protection Agency"s Electronics Donation and Recycling webpage for more information.

What concerns solid waste managers is not just the growth in volume and bulkiness of these items – it’s the toxicity of their components. Old TVs can contain up to seven pounds of lead. Besides lead, other contaminants such as mercury, nickel and cadmium can find their way into the water and food supply due to incineration or landfill operations. In 2009, the EPA estimated that up to 75 percent of electronic items are discarded as regular household waste.

It is illegal in Oregon to dispose of computers, monitors and TVs in the garbage or at disposal sites such as landfills, incinerators and transfer stations. Anyone knowingly disposing of these items can be fined.

Don"t place computers, monitors and TVs in your trash, recycling bin or place them at the curb. These items require special handling and cannot be collected via your regular curbside service.

Disposal sites cannot accept computers, monitors and TVs for disposal. A recycling depot located at a landfill, transfer station or other site may accept them for recycling. Check with the facility first.

Oregon E-Cycles provides free recycling of computers, monitors and TVs. Anyone can bring seven or fewer computers, monitors and TVs at a time to participating Oregon E-Cycles collectors for free recycling.

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