Irish people have been very good at recycling waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) since regulations were introduced here in 2005. Over 9 Kg of WEEE per person was collected and sent for recycling.
Where this material is recovered is not so clear cut and much of the European WEEE ends up being exported to Africa and Asia where the precious metals are recovered by hand in dangerous working conditions.
Much of the material is shipped through the port of Rotterdam and is destined for locations such as the Ivory Coast where children burn the plastic on open fires or leach the gold components with cyanide.
Rotterdam is Europe's busiest port, a hub for regional shipping with more than nine million containers passing through each year. Just one-third of those carrying goods for export are from the Netherlands, with most coming from the EU's other 26 states.
Customs officials select suspect shipments through risk profiling, sorting through a list of indicators including the container's sender and its destination. But even though the Dutch have led the way in cracking down on illegal e-waste exports - the European Union banned the trade in the mid-1990s - only 3% or so of the containers in Rotterdam are checked. An unknown number of containers slip through, or are directed to European ports with fewer controls.
Traffickers trick the authorities by not labelling goods as electronics, by pretending they are for re-use, or by hiding them in the middle of a container. The containers that get through are shipped to West Africa - most commonly Ghana and Nigeria - and to South Asian countries including India and Pakistan.
According to ABI Research some 53 million tonnes of WEEE were generated worldwide last year and only 13% of that material was recycled. Most of the WEEE from the USA ends up in China.
Many of the electronic items are badly designed making it very expensive to recycle in Europe and therefore it is dumped in developing countries. Alongside environmental damage in the developing world Europe is buying then losing large quantities of increasingly scarce raw materials contained in e-waste.
The solution lies in getting electronics companies to design greener products and weaning consumers off their electronics habit. If the laws are fully enforced and people pay the full cost of their actions then we may be able to move to greener production and consumption.
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