By FN for APCNews GOA, India,
Published onPage last updated on
If you believe in the power of technology, here’s a book you just can’t afford to miss. “Challenging The Chip” is a 2006-published book on labour rights and environmental justice in the global electronics industry.
Fresh out of the oven of the Temple University Press, in Philadelphia, the 357-page book is structured in three parts that look at global electronics, environmental justice and labour rights, and electronic waste and extended producer responsibility.
Environmental author Sandra Steingraber calls this book "essential reading for anyone who owns a cell phone or a computer" and states that "our digital possessions connect us not only to global information but also to global contamination and injustice.”
Its three editors mention that their book has "two geographical frames of reference" — the vicinity of San Jose, California (or, Silicon Valley), and "parts of the world increasingly integrated into global networks of electronics production, consumption, and disposal".
From behind this grim story emerges a tale that we have yet to fully understand
There are problems of contamination by hi-tech manufacturing (of workers, air, land and water) from all around -Silicon Valley in the US, Silicon Glen in Scotland, Silicon Island in Thailand, and Silicon Paddy in China. It contrasts the reality between the "CEOs and upper management" drawing "multi-million dollar salaries and ‘golden parachutes’" up against the reality of the production workers living in packed dormitories and often facing sweatshop conditions.
E-waste issues get looked at in the context of trading or dumping from the North to South. "But as nations like India and China increasingly modernise, their own industries and consumers are contributing to the problems as well," say the editors.
Chapters of the book cover "Made in China" electronics workers, Thailand’s electronic sector’s corporate social responsibility, electronic workers in India, workers in and around Central and Eastern Europe’s semiconductor plants (Russia, Belarus, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Romania), Silicon Valley’s Toxics’ Coalition and workers’ struggles, Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park, high-tech pollution in Japan, e-waste in Delhi.
Other issues focussed on by the co-editors include environmental degradation, occupational health hazards, and the "widespread ignorance" of the "health and ecological footprints of the global electronics industry", producer responsibility laws in Sweden and Japan, the electronic waste trade, among other themes.
Legislating corporate responsibility
Extended producer responsibility legislation is having its impact in places like Sweden and Japan.
Lund University (Sweden)-based assistant professor Naoko Tojo says that a "handful of studies" suggest that extended producer responsibility (EPR) promotes change in product design. But empirical studies on the effectiveness of EPR programmes in promoting "upstream changes" have been limited.
She contrasts EPR laws in Japan and Sweden, which differ in allocation of responsibility for collection and recycling. The Japanese Specified Home Appliances Recycling Law, in force since 2001, covers four large home appliances (TV sets with CRTs, refrigerators and freezers, air conditioners, and washing machines). In Sweden, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive covers all electrical and electronic equipment, except refrigerators, freezers and automatic
dispensers.
In Challenging The Chip, Naoko Tojo also writes: "EPR legislation has been providing significant incentives for producers to work on designing products’ end of life…"
When recycling becomes counter productive
But the spread goes beyond North America. Various areas of the Indian capital of Delhi are involved in disassembly of computers, cathode ray tube (CRT) breaking, marketing electronic scrap, mainframe computer disassembling, trading and recharging of CRTs, lead recovery, circuit board recycling, glass recovery, and even gold recovery! Delhi’s e-waste recycling is clandestine, workers put in 12 hour days and for seven days a week. Workers are unaware of the impacts, and routinely deal with toxic heavy metals and worse.
Take these figures: about 80% of the electronic wastes collected in North America for "recycling" actually find their way, quite legally, to dangerously primitive, highly polluting recycling operations in Asia.
Hi-tech’s "dirty little secret" is simply that there are unknown dangers lurking in our electronic equipment, and that the electronics industry has a stratagem to avoid both accountability and real downstream costs for its hazardous material use and poor end-of-life design considerations.
Challenging The Chip’s co-editors say: "Although most consumers are eager to enjoy their latest computers, televisions, cellular phones, iPods, and electronic games, few relate the declining prices of these and other electronic technologies to the labor of Third World women, who are paid pennies a day."
Activism that challenges the chip beyond the book
Many people are organising worldwide to get the word out and raise awareness of what’s involved when you go out to acquire a piece of electronics.
"From iPod to iWaste: Toxic trash in your pocket" said a giant poster at San Francisco’s latest MacWorld gathering, to protest Apple Computer’s contribution to the rapidly accumulating e-waste.
Microsoft, the software giant that is seen as the only option by nine out of ten computer users globally, was targeted too. Activists protested Microsoft’s role "in accelerating electronics product obsolescence by piling e-waste in front of the firm’s headquarters" in 1999.
The Computer Take Back Campaign was formed in early 2001 by environmental health and waste-reduction activists from the USA and Canada. Their goal? To hold corporations accountable for the life-cycle effects of their products. There’s a story on the campaign website taking on the Dell computer manufacturer.
Last November, the PC Global project of the Berlin-based non governmental organisation WEED organised a two day presentation and workshop called “High-Tech Sweatshops in China”. Two Hong Kong activists came to Germany to discuss the new work structures and ways of organising in global factories. PC Global activists say they used Challenging The Chip to help come up with their initiative and continue to use it as a reference book.
There are some useful appendices to this book – one on the principles of environmental justice, another on the silicon principles of socially and environmentally responsible electronics manufacturing. The third offers useful "sample shareholder resolutions. Ditto from ideas of the Computer Take Back Campaign, and the electronic recyclers’ pledge of true stewardship.
In all the hype about IT and the cyber-revolution, only a tiny section of books touch on the subject of hazards. A search request on the internet for the relevant keywords would probably bear this out. Some exceptions are the 2003-published Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing their Impacts (Eco-Efficiency in Industry and Science) by R. Kuehr and Eric Williams. One recalls seeing a book on hazardous wastes from South East Asia, at a time when electronics was still perceived as a "clean" industry!
Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), Amsterdam
http://www.somo.nl
Challenging the chip: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1788_reg.html
Computer Take Back Campaign (CTBC): http://www.computertakeback.com/
PC Global project (from non-profit organisation WEED): http://www.pcglobal.org/
Photo: Frederick Noronha
