A city tries to make sure its electronics waste does not get sent overseas:
Seven months after one company bid on a $40,000 contract to recycle the electronics Jacksonville residents put out with their trash, City Hall plans to start over from scratch.
The reason: fear that those old televisions and computers might be dumped half a world away and end up poisoning people.
The city has no evidence the lone bidder, Recycling E-Scrap, is doing anything improper.
“He may be doing everything aboveboard,” said Chris Pearson, chief of the city’s Solid Waste Division.
But months of questions and follow-ups about how e-waste would be disposed of ended with the sides divided over what assurances are reasonable. The city is warehousing scrap electronics until a recycler is hired.
“They were wanting me to guarantee where it was going after I sell it to a customer, and I can’t do that,” said Jack Jones, the company’s owner. Some of Jones’ customers do business in China and Vietnam, countries known for electronics dumping, and he said what they do there is their responsibility, not his.
Pearson said he and the city’s lawyers want to be sure Jacksonville’s waste isn’t part of a global trade that ships electronics overseas to be stripped of valuable materials in unsafe, environmentally harmful conditions.
The exchange reflects the murkiness surrounding a large part of the electronics recycling industry.
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Mountains of obsolete personal computers, televisions and videocassette players have been shipped to Third World countries as salvage during the past 20 years. At the same time, generations of new equipment and tighter controls on American landfills have raised pressure on cities and companies to find reliable means of disposal.
The United Nations tried to limit international waste dumping through the Basel Convention, a treaty negotiated in 1989. But the United States never ratified the treaty, meaning it’s not enforceable here.
