European and International Environmental Laws Research Essay

European and International Environmental Laws Research Essay

How do practices of consumption, disposal, and disassembly of everyday electronic objects, such as personal computers and mobile phone effect on sustainable development? Organic chemicals and heavy metals are often found near plants where electronics are manufactured, as well as in garbage dumps where the electronics are disposed of later. This can be evidenced by the presence of lead, cadmium, mercury etc. which are the basic components used for and in electronic products. Other organic chemicals, like flame- retardants, and lead power, have also been discovered near these kinds of cites. Many theorize that these chemicals may even be stored in the human body, and may present as the source of heavy neurological damage, especially in children. Clearly, e-waste impacts on societies in Europe, South Asia and America in several ways -- socially, economically, and biologically. This in turn impacts sustainable development.

Research Essay

Recycling of raw materials from discarded electronics is a quite effective solution to the growing e-waste catastrophe, and may one day lead to truly "sustainable development." Many electronic devices contain an array of materials, including metals, which can be recovered for future use. By disassembling these discarded electronics and reusing them, some natural resources are conserved and air and water pollution caused by hazardous disposal is somewhat lessened. What is more, recycling reduces the amount of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the manufacturing of new electronics. Legislators and environment activists agree -- it makes good sense and is efficient to recycle and to do one's part to keep the environment green, and put the global economy on a path toward truly sustainable development. See, Haffenreffer, David (2003-02-13). "Recycling, the Hewlett-Packard Way." The Financial Times.

Interestingly, many computer components can be reused in making brand new computer products, whilst others must be reduced to their metal parts, which can later be reused in applications like commercial or home construction, flatware manufacturing, and jewelry making. Ibid.

Chemical substances found in large quantities from these products include epoxy resins, fiberglass, PCBs, PVC, thermosetting plastics, lead, tin, copper, silicon, beryllium, carbon, and iron.

Elements found in trace amounts include: cadmium, mercury, and thallium.

Elements found in smaller amounts include americium, antimony, arsenic, barium, bismuth, boron, cobalt, europium, gallium, germanium, gold, indium, lithium, manganese, nickel, niobium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, selenium, silver, tantalum, terbium, thorium, titanium, vanadium, and yttrium.

All electronics contain some lead and tin and copper, including wire and printed circuit board tracks. Supra. However, the use of lead-free solder is now spreading rapidly. The following are ordinary applications:

* Americium: smoke alarms .

* Mercury: fluorescent tubes, tilt switches (mechanical doorbells, thermostats).

* Sulfur: lead-acid batteries.

* PBBs: Predecessor of PCBs. Also used as flame retardant. Banned from 1973.

* PCBs: prior to ban, almost all 1930s -- 1970s equipment, including capacitors, transformers, wiring insulation, paints, inks, and flexible sealants. Banned during the 1980s.

* Cadmium: light-sensitive resistors, corrosion-resistant alloys for marine and aviation environments, nickel-cadmium batteries.

* Lead: solder, CRT monitor glass, lead-acid batteries, some formulations of PVC.[34] A typical 15-inch cathode ray tube may contain 1.5 pounds of lead,[1] but other CRTs have been estimated as having up to 8 pounds of lead.

* Beryllium oxide: filler in some thermal interface materials such as thermal grease used on heatsinks for CPUs and power transistors, magnetrons, X-ray-transparent ceramic windows, heat transfer fins in vacuum tubes, and gas lasers.

* Polyvinyl chloride Third most widely produced plastic, contains additional chemicals to change the chemical consistency of the product. Some of these additional chemicals called additives can leach out of vinyl products. Plasticizers that must be added to make PVC flexible have been additives of particular concern. Burning PVC in connection with humidity in the air creates Hydrogen Chloride (HCl), an acid.

Generally non-hazardous electronics manufacturing materials:

* Tin: solder, coatings on component leads.

* Copper: copper wire, printed circuit board tracks, component leads.

* Aluminium: nearly all electronic goods using more than a few watts of power (heatsinks), electrolytic capacitors.

* Iron: steel chassis, cases, and fixings.

* Germanium: 1950s -- 1960s transistorized electronics (bipolar junction transistors).

* Silicon: glass, transistors, ICs, printed circuit boards.

* Nickel: nickel-cadmium batteries.

* Lithium: lithium-ion batteries.

* Zinc: plating for steel parts.

* Gold: connector plating, primarily in computer equipment.

According to a report by the Basel Action Network, The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Toxics Link India, Scope Pakistan and Greenpeace China, entitled, Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia (Feb.25, 2002), the United States and other wealthy countries which use many of the world's electronic products and generate most of the e-waste, have made use of a convenient, "and until now, hidden escape valve -- exporting the E-waste crisis to the developing countries of Asia."

Some believe trade in e-waste is an export that is harming the poorer communities of Asia. "Open burning, acid baths and toxic dumping pour pollution into the land, air and water and exposes the men, women and children of Asia's poorer peoples to poison. The health and economic costs of this trade are vast and, due to export, are not born by the western consumers nor the waste brokers who benefit from the trade." Ibid.

The exportation of e-waste is a "dirty little secret" of the high-tech economy. "Scrutiny has been studiously avoided by the electronics industry, by government officials, and by some involved in E-waste recycling." Supra.

The report states that up to 50% of the electronics collected for supposed recycling in the U.S. And Europe are actually shipped to Asia, and dumped as garbage.

International Legal Framework

To combat this onslaught of pollution, government authorities first convened decades ago. Their first project -- The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, usually known simply as the Basel Convention. This is an international treaty which was created to halt the flow of hazardous waste between nations, and to prevent transfer of hazardous waste from developed countries like the U.S. To less developed countries (LDCs). The convention was also intended to help LDCs learn environmentally sound management of hazardous and other wastes.

The treaty was ready for signature on 22 March 1989, and entered into force on 5 May 1992, globally. There are 175 parties to the treaty, but, tellingly, Afghanistan, Haiti, and the United States have not yet ratified the treaty. This is an international public policy disgrace, and the Obama administration should use its considerable powers to get the treaty through the U.S. Senate, I respectfully submit.

U.S. Legislation, Regulation

Though the U.S. has been a laggard internationally, it has made strides at home in pollution prevention, generally.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is a national law in the United States governing the disposal of solid waste and hazardous waste passed in the early 1970s. See Public Law 94-580, 42 U.S.C. § 6901 et seq.

The U.S. Congress enacted RCRA to solve the problems the U.S. faced from its growing volume of municipal and industrial waste, especially electronics. RCRA amended the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, and set national goals for:

The protection of human health and the environment from the potential hazards of waste disposal.

The conservation of energy and natural resources.

The reduction of the amount of waste generated.

The management of wastes in an environmentally sound manner.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waste management rules are codified in Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations parts 239-282. Regulations regarding management of hazardous waste begin in part 260. Many states have also enacted laws and created regulations that are at least as stringent as the federal regulations.

What is more, the statute authorizes states to carry out many of the functions of RCRA through their individual hazardous waste programs once such programs have been approved by the EPA. Ibid.

RCRA handles regulatory functions of hazardous and non-hazardous waste, and its most well-known provisions regard the Subtitle C. program which tracks the progress of hazardous wastes from their point of generation, their transport, and their treatment and/or disposal. Because of the extensive tracking elements at all points of the life of the hazardous waste, the overall process has become known as the "cradle to grave" system. The regulatory framework has stringent bookkeeping and reporting requirements for generators, transporters, and operators of treatment, storage and disposal facilities handling hazardous waste. Supra.

The U.S. Congress expanded the law with the Hazardous and Solid Wastes Amendments of 1984. These amendments bolstered the law by covering smaller generators of hazardous waste and creating requirements for hazardous waste incinerators, and the shuttering of substandard landfills. By 1986, the law was expanded further to regulate underground storage tanks and other leaking waste storage facilities.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as "Superfund," was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1980 to address the problem of remediating abandoned hazardous waste sites, by establishing legal liability, as well as a trust fund for cleanup. CERCLA applies to contaminated sites, while RCRA's focus is on controlling the ongoing generation and management of particular waste streams. RCRA, like CERCLA, has provisions to require cleanup of contaminated sites that occurred in the past.

The E.U. Strategy

According to a paper prepared for the conference on European Management of Globalization (Feb.23, 2007 at Princeton University) by R. Daniel Kelemen of Rutgers University, called, Globalizing EU Environmental Regulation, globalization has generated two main threats to environmental policy in Europe.

Firstly, there is the so-called race-to-the-bottom pressure. EU member states have among the world's toughest environmental standards, and those rules impose costs on European firms that their competitors in non-EU jurisdictions do not encounter. Ibid.

Thus, the further liberalization of trade between EU member states and environmental laggards around the world, it is argued, will generate a regulatory 'race-to-the-bottom', coercing EU member states to devolve their standards to maintain economic competitiveness. Supra.

Secondly, international institutions charged with promoting economic liberalization, including the World Trade Organization (WTO), is perceived as interfering in the setting of some environmental standards. When EU member states choose to maintain stringent environmental standards, these may be struck down by the WTO as illegal non-tariff barriers to trade. Supra.

This has caused a something of a mixed reaction from European environmental policy-makers. They have not treated these pressures as uncontrollable, irresistible manifestations of globalization, but have moved to manage these pressures. To borrow Meunier and Jacoby's (2007) colourful phrase, they have engaged in "offensive management," seeking to spread EU environmental standards around the globe. During the past twenty years, the EU has portrayed itself as the world leader in the field of international environmental policy.

The EU has pursued two principal strategies here: it has supported multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in a range of policy areas, pressing other countries to take on environmental commitments. The EU has also lobbied for greener international trade, demanding the international trade regime accommodate a variety of restrictions on trade related to environmental protection, like restrictions on dumping of electronics waste in Asia.

EU states haven't traditionally lead the field in international environmental policy. The last thirty-five years have witnessed a dramatic role reversal, in which the U.S. And the EU traded places in environmental policy standards setting (Vogel and Kelemen, MS; Sbragia and Damro 1999).

As environmental issues clambered onto the international scene in the early 1970s, the U.S. was the clear leader, and member states of the European Economic Community were followers. America remained a leader through the mid-1980s, with the U.S. acting as the propellant behind the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. What is more, European governments remained laggards throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, even resisting U.S. pressure for bold action on ozone depletion until 24 years ago

However, the EU's transmogrification from loser to leader in environmental policy occurred between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The EU's leadership continued to strengthen throughout the 1990s. A shift in domestic politics in Europe helped.

Environmentalists gained political power throughout a number of powerful member states and at the EU level, and demanded more ambitious policies at the national, EU and international levels, as the Cold War ended. The power of Green parties grew throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Green parties became a real political force, first in Germany, and later in Sweden, and France (Mair 2001). They may have stayed in the parliamentary opposition during the 1980s, but by the 1990s, they had entered the main and joined coalition governments alongside social democrats in a number of countries. Shaken by the rising power of Green movements, governments in a number of Member States supported strict domestic standards and enhanced their commitments to international environmental cooperation.

This green power, at national level in Europe, was intensified by the regulatory politics in the EU. The European Commission and the European Parliament passed incentives to favor a greener EU. National environmental regulations threatened to undermine progress on completing the internal market, but with many on the Left already arguing that the EU merely served the interests of international business, attacking national environmental standards as non-tariff barriers to intra-Community trade would have been politically difficult.

Thus, the EU flanked its Single European Market initiative with a drive to harmonize environmental standards across Europe. Environmental policy emerged as a crucial piece of the EU's image making effort. Supra.

With Germany as the leader, these 'green' Member States -- i.e. The Netherlands and Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Finland -- demanded that the EU adopt stringent, ambitious environmental policies as common regulations (Kelemen 2004; Vogel 2004; Zito 2000).

So, starting in the late 1980s and continuing to the present, the EU has erected the most strict body of environmental regulation of any jurisdiction in the world, ranging from rules on air and water pollution, to waste management and recycling, to chemical safety regulation.

CONCLUSION

Were the rest of the world to adopt EU environmental standards, the world would be a much "greener place" today. According to the U.S. EPA, of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life (EOL) management in fiscal year 2007, 18%, or 414,000 tons, was collected for recycling and 82%, or 1.84 million tons, was disposed of, primarily in landfills, mostly overseas. This is an outrage, and is not sustainable for the long-term. The U.S. must be forced to adopt EU-style environmental regulations to save the plant. According to Greenpeace International, most old electronics gather dust in the closet awaiting reuse, or recycling. Most are just thrown away. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as much as three quarters of the computers sold in the U.S. are stockpiled in garages and closets. When thrown away, they end up in landfills or incinerators or, more recently, are exported to Asia.

American and European e-waste is routinely, according to Greenpeace, is exported to developing countries, in violation of international law. Inspectors at 18 European seaports back in 2005 found as much as 47% of waste destined for export, including e-waste, was illegal. In the U.K. alone, at least 23,000 metric tonnes of undeclared or grey market electronic waste materials were illegally shipped in 2003 to the Far East, India, Africa and China. At least 50-80% of the waste collected for recycling is being exported in this way in the U.S. This practice is legal because the U.S. has not ratified the Basel Convention.