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Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers
Just read Al's post about this sort of shenanigans. To get around the problem of contamination from recycling many materials in the first world, and legal cases in the USA with the EPA (who interestingly have the right to bear arms in their duty), I suspect we now just ship it to jurisdictions who don't have regulatory oversight.
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Craig, you're absolutely right. Very interesting post, thank you.
Within a couple of years after the Federal criminal case against Chemetco, all secondary (scrap) smelters within the USA had shut down. They couldn't meet the regulatory standards that were set higher after the case. The EPA had previously benchmarked some production emission levels against Chemetco (when it was still operating) but discovered that these were falsely far lower than the reality.
Scrap collection continued as usual (so at the merchant level, plenty of activity) but nearly the whole lot is now shipped to India and China. And you're right. The Stockholm Convention on POPs (persistent organic pollutants) is apparently a known protocol out there, but there is little or no regulation.
Nearly every gramme of copper that we use in consumer electronics has a grubby 'ghost self'. It is the invisible signature of dioxin production that goes along with the smelting, and the air, land and water pollution (lead, cadmium, arsenic, beryllium, mercury). It looks pristine when we see it, but that's the invisible cost.
We went through our grubby environmentally destructive history between the 18th century and maybe up to and including the 1970s to 1980s. Now, almost everything we buy requires a developing country to keep production costs down by downgrading the control of emissions.
The case that I spent so long investigating showed that even when heavy metals are captured -- for example in scrubber dust and solids -- that waste, if it's in a country with high regulatory standards, may be tagged so hazardous that it can barely be moved - certainly not in a way that doesn't hammer production costs. This is exactly what happened with Chemetco. They had millions of tonnes of 'zinc oxide' in a mountain at the plant. But that was a misnomer. It had started as zinc oxide, but after it had been used as a scrubbing agent, it was full of heavy metals and deemed too hazardous to move in a way that was cost effective. Indeed, there was no legal alternative use for it, so it just grew into a bigger and bigger pile of waste.
Finally, the plant owner decided to build a 10 inch diameter pipe, bury it, and illegally (felony) use that to flush the stuff into a tributary of the Mississippi river. That went on, undiscovered, for over ten years.
Regulation is a double-edge sword. It's best when chemical factories and production facilities are designed and run to have minimal emissions, and satisfactory, self-policing emissions control. But it is still far too tempting for owners of production facilities to flush stuff down storm drains, put it in barrels and pay a few dollars to a poor farmer to bury it on his land, or a fisherman to dump it at sea, or in other ways, hide it. Not justifying it at all, just saying we're really shielded in the West, from the true cost of our consumption of cheap goods.