- [Jim] They had a place where they'd store it
right under our noses.
They just thought they could get away with it forever,
and they could have if it hadn't been for those trackers.
(Jim laughs)
- [Reporter] Right now, you're watching this
on an electronic device.
Do you ever think about where it'll end up
when you're done with it?
Many devices contain toxic materials
and should be recycled very carefully.
Sadly, lots end up in landfills
but even if you're diligent and give your electronic waste,
or e-waste, to a recycler, that's no guarantee
about what happens next.
American recyclers often ship it overseas,
frequently to countries in Southern Asia.
There, workers take apart toxic material by hand,
often without proper safety measures,
and US policy lets it happen.
But thanks to one small nonprofit,
not everyone gets away with it.
- That means they're really worried
about our program, probably.
(idyllic music)
- So we usually wanna put our tracker
somewhere where it'll be nice to fit in.
So, for example, right here is a good spot.
- [Reporter] We're at the office of the Basel Action
Network, or BAN, a nonprofit group that's dedicated
to following the e-waste trade around the world.
BAN installs secret GPS trackers in electronics
and then drops them off at recyclers
to see where they end up.
Jim Puckett is the founder and director of BAN.
- In the late 1980s, way back when,
there was a rash, an epidemic, of people exporting
their hazardous waste to developing countries
rather than properly managing it at home
'cause it was difficult, poisonous stuff, right?
So people said, "Oh hell, we'll just use ships out there,
"and free trade, and go ahead and export it."
- [Reporter] Americans throw out millions of tons
of electronics every year,
and export abroad is still a big problem.
Take for instance, LCD monitors that contain mercury.
If a worker, in say Hong Kong, smashes it,
poisonous vapor can be released into the air.
Workers dismantling electronics can get severely sick
and even die.
A 1989 treaty called the Basel Convention
does regulate the export of e-waste
but the US has never ratified it,
and a provision that would stop countries
from sending e-waste to many developing nations
isn't in effect.
- The US has been remiss for many years now,
for about 20 some years,
particularly environmental treaties.
- [Reporter] So there's very little
stopping American recyclers from dumping
their electronics abroad
until BAN gets involved.
- And so the tracker will go here.
This board will end up going
right about there
so it still looks like a normal piece of electronic.
- [Reporter] Without federal e-waste laws,
BAN's tracking system is one of the only ways
for businesses and governments to find out
who they wanna work with.
After we bugged this monitor, we made plans to drop it
at a local recycler.
- This is the loading dock
where you will be walking up to and delivering it.
- What do you say when you walk up to the counter?
- "We have something to deliver for you guys.
"Here's an old monitor."
Just act like a customer, and that's it!
(classical string music)
- [Reporter] This recycler, which we're not naming,
has been caught exporting waste in the past,
and BAN wants to check up on them.
- Hi! - Yeah, he's dropping it off
for recycling.
- [Recycler] Yeah, would you like a receipt?
- [BAN Employee] Yes, please.
- [Recycler] That'd be an email right up here.
- [BAN Employee] Okay.
It's that easy.
- [Reporter] It was incredibly easy.
What email address did you put in?
- [BAN Employee] My personal email address.
- [Reporter] Okay.
- [BAN Employee] Not my work email address (chuckles)
- [Reporter] (laughs) I was gonna say!
Afterwards, BAN set me up with their in-house software
called EarthEye so I could follow the monitor's trail.
As we were working on this video,
I could see it had traveled miles outside of Seattle
to an e-waste processing facility.
(sullen ambient music)
Using EarthEye, BAN has tracked the spread of e-waste
all over the planet.
- We have two trackers here, one that ended up in Hong Kong
and one that ended up in Thailand.
As we zoom in, it just looks like a farmland.
Keep zooming in
and you see all this trash right here.
This black part is, I believe, from the sludge
from actually burning and handling this material.
- [Reporter] Again, exporting electronics
is not against the law in the US
but with the help of investigators,
BAN has still managed to send some unethical recyclers
to prison.
(somber ambient music)
- [Jim] Wow, the Total Reclaim story goes way back.
- [Reporter] In 2002, BAN produced a documentary
about e-waste exported to China,
and they interviewed recyclers about their practices.
- And the only one that would talk to us
was Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim.
And we put him in our film as being a good guy
that was concerned about the export,
that he still had to do some exporting
but he didn't like to do it.
- [Reporter] The local Seattle recycler Total Reclaim
eventually signed on to BAN's certification program,
meaning they pledged to recycle ethically.
- So he became, over the years,
our poster child of the good recycler.
- [Reporter] Lorch even appeared in the BAN documentary
complaining about unprincipled recyclers.
- You're charging on the front side,
you're selling the material on the back side offshore,
you don't do any work in-between,
you just arrange to have the material
loaded into a shipping container and shipped.
It's all about the money.
- [Reporter] But in 2015, while working on tracking report,
BAN noticed waste flowing from Oregon to Total Reclaim
in Washington.
It made its way to Seattle's industrial Harbor Island,
only about three miles from BAN's office.
- We're just really so close it's amazing.
- [Reporter] Then the tracker crossed the Pacific
to Hong Kong.
- And we were shocked.
We were just like, "Whoa!
"These things do not lie.
"What's going on with Total Reclaim,
"our poster child of the good guys?"
- [Reporter] BAN's report drew the atteniton
of state and federal investigators.
As Assistant US Attorney Seth Wilkinson explains,
Total Reclaim broke the law by lying to their customers.
- In this case, we don't have a federal law
that specifically prohibits sending things overseas,
sending this material overseas.
What we do have is federal laws that makes it illegal
to commit fraud, to make material misrepresentations
about something in order to get money.
- [Reporter] And the more digging investigators did,
the more fabrications that turned up.
- Total Reclaim initially said,
"Oh, there must be some mistake.
"We don't send flat-screen monitors to Asia."
And they said, "What we do do is we send plastic to Asia."
And they said, "What must have happened
"is that one of the GPS devices must have fallen out
"of a monitor, fallen into a bin of plastic,
"and been transported over to Asia."
And to back that false narrative up,
they created a bunch of false documents.
- [Reporter] Puckett traveled to Hong Kong
where he found Total Reclaim's discarded LCD monitors
and workers who could have been poisoned by them.
Eventually, Total Reclaim fessed up
and the founders were ultimately charged with fraud.
- [Seth] The defendants are charged with one count
of conspiracy in violation of Title 18, United States Code,
Section 371.
- [Reporter] The founders agreed to a plea deal
and were each sentenced to 28 months in prison.
So BAN's system worked,
although for Puckett, it hardly felt like a relief.
- Probably one of the most troubling things
I've experienced in this business
of being an advocate was getting a real ally
and then find out that you're betrayed by that ally.
- [Reporter] It'd be hard to picture
just how much of this stuff recyclers have to deal with
so we visited a local business called Friendly Earth,
which says it's trying to handle the work repsonsibly
like Total Reclaim was supposed to.
This is what it looks like when you first get--
- This is, yeah, this is--
- It looks like a mess. (laughs)
- A pretty good example of it.
You're gonna see a mix of loose circuit boards,
(pleasant electronic music)
plenty of wire, plenty of cabling, maybe a desktop or two.
This one looks like it's seen better days.
- [Reporter] The company takes in thousands of pounds
of electronics a day around Washington.
It refurbishes what it can and sends the rest
to other companies to be broken down further.
- We are small in comparison to a lot of the recyclers
out there that have shredders,
or fleet of 20 to 30 trucks,
or maybe seven to 10, 12, 15 locations across the world.
We're growing but we're growing organically
and we're doing it the right way.
(hat-wearing woman speaks in foreign language)
- [Reporter] For a lot of Americans,
the effects of e-waste can seem so far away
that they're hard to grasp
but the way our electronics are recycled matters.
Federal legislation to reform e-waste exporting
has been on the table for years but keeps slipping away.
Meanwhile, the damage that's happening is real.
- Pollution, it does harm people.
Nobody quantifies it, and it's really hard to quantify
how many deaths or disease
but it is a form of murder.
When people die from this, and they all die prematurely,
the data supports the fact that these pollutants
do cause death and disease.
- [Reporter] By contrast, proper recycling
is more expensive but it is doable.
So by the numbers, none of this really had to happen.
- Each of the owners of Total Reclaim
took home almost $8 million in income
over the period that this was going on.
It woulda cost about $2.5 million
for them to do this properly
so perhaps instead of each of them making eight,
they would've made $6.5 million each.
(discordant ambient music)