the charity, their WEEE, their contractor, his partner and the regulator
This is a story of traceability and accuracy in ethical labelling.
Charity x does good work in refurbishing computers - which they give to local and international groups who need IT. They apparently said that those donated products which they could not use were recycled in the UK due to the WEEE directive. This is a European directive which prevents electrical waste from going to landfill.
To me, this sounded pretty unlikely given the mix of materials in IT waste. So I asked if they could tell me more, so they directed me to their contractor, SWEEEP Ltd of Sittingbourne in Kent. So I asked Justin Greenaway of SWEEEP whether they export any of the waste to contractors in other countries.
Justin initially said that they only export 'raw materials'. So I asked what that meant. It turns out he means that they break up the computers into various parts (wires, printed circuit boards etc) and some of those are exported. I'm not sure about you, but those are not 'raw materials' to me.
Anyway - fine I said, what do you export and to where. And in the end, he gave me the name of the company in China who takes the majority of their plastic waste - a company called Gold Leader. So strictly speaking, the charity is inaccurate to say that their waste is recycled in the UK.
Now, I want to be quite clear. Justin did not have to give me this information. I have no doubt that if you were to visit his factory in Kent you would find all the correct paperwork and everything kosher.
The problem is what happens then. The Environment Agency issues export licenses of the waste - and, according to them this is assessed against a paper-chain supplied by the exporter. The Chinese company has an ISO certification and is said to be operating to 'European standards'.
The problem is that ISO is itself a paper based scheme backed up by very irregular inspection regimes. China has no environmental regulations to speak of. Chinese companies are known to try to cut corners at any opportunity in order to make additional profit. There is every reason to suppose that they are cutting corners - because, ultimately, why else would it be more affordable to process materials in China than in Europe?
The Environment Agency does not visit China. Even the contractor has not visited China, but said that a customer had visited the factory and states that it is the 'best factory they have seen in China'. So - how do we know that the Chinese factory is not subcontracting or reselling the plastic to another, much worse factory? The contractor does not know. The EA does not have the resources to check. The charity is not involved in the vast majority of the chain.
The materials have disappeared into an enormous black-hole where anything could be happening.
On the other hand, what is the alternative? Setting up a hugely expensive tracking system? Burying the stuff in Europe? IT recycling in Europe is a hugely profitable process, I am reliably informed. And the Chinese are resourceful business-people. I recently saw a TV programme where a man who collected cardboard actually had to pay shops for their waste cardboard - an unthinkable transaction in the UK.
The problem is ultimately that nobody really cares. Nobody has the time or resources to check out all the steps through this chain. Even if they did and found something slightly untoward, what would they do? In the cold light of day, what can we expect from WEEE contractors, who are only following the auditing proceedure set up by the WEEE directive?
I don't know. But I'm not happy that we seem to think throwing our waste at China is somehow an ethical solution. Has nobody considered that maybe we should not be generating this waste in the first place?
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