E-waste recycling is deceptive.

• Author: Palmer, Paul
• Position: Less of What We Don't Need

What's that you say? You've read about this disaster in China and Ghana? No, I'm not referring to that at all. I'm referring to the grand deception practiced in the USA by environmental groups that are more interested in their public relations and their support for garbage creation than their stewardship of the planet.

There is a program for "collecting e-waste" in this country, and it is fostered by local governments that rely on a shared, cultural assumption that garbage is universal and must be accepted for all time. Since it is always more acceptable to act in synchrony with cultural assumptions, rather than against them, many environmental groups have adopted convenient and profitable notions built around processing electronic goods into various forms of garbage, while making a great show of recovery or refurbishing.

As soon as you read "e-waste" you know something is wrong. If you are concerned with saving planetary resources, which must be done by reuse, why would you emphasize the status of products as "waste?" Why would you adopt the terms of the garbage industry suggesting that all unwanted goods are useless bits of trash, destined soon for the dump or incinerator?

Why would you want to cede control of the subject to those who are hell-bent on destroying the planet by over-consumption followed by easy discard? Yet this is the uninformed approach so beloved of the recyclers. There are much better ways to approach the basic problem which do not imply such negatives. Let's ask ourselves how we can design systems for dealing with "expired or unwanted electronic goods." That's at least a neutral and correctly descriptive term. Leave terms that end with "waste" to the despoilers of the planet.

I assume you have all heard ad nauseam about the villages in China and Africa where old electronics are burned in large smoking piles to extract the valuable metals; where children and adults are contaminated and made ill for desperately needed income. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But let's ask how to frame the core objection to these activities. When you think about it, the objection is made to what is being done with the expired goods. The message is that it is not acceptable to burn them in the open air, even if this is the best process that poor villagers can devise to recover value.

So if we are to design a better, more civilized, more acceptable approach to recovery or reuse, you would expect that our core task is to devise a better way to...