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Report – Exporting the Public’s E-waste to Developing Countries

“The international toxic trade watchdog organization, Basel Action Network (BAN), released a new report today following a two-year study that involved placing electronic GPS tracking devices into old hazardous electronic equipment such as printers, and computer monitors, and then watching where they travelled across the globe.  The report, the first to be released from the project is entitled Disconnect: Goodwill and Dell Exporting the Public’s E-waste to Developing Countries, and is released in conjunction with the airing of a PBS NewHour segment entitled The Circuit, as well as an MIT interactive website which graphically shows the overall movement of the tracked devices. BAN’s e-Trash Transparency Project so far has delivered 200 trackers across the US to places where the public is likely to take their old electronics to be recycled – such as recyclers and Goodwill stores. The results are in and we now see that instead of being recycled, 65 (32.5%) of these devices, were exported overseas on container ships. Most of them went to Asia, and most were traded in likely violation of the laws of the importing countries. Of the 149 trackers delivered just to recyclers, 39% of these were exported…”

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