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The first time Dr Pablo Dias set foot at an Australian recycling facility to see how the country’s electronic waste was being handled, he was struck by disappointment.
Until then, the 31-year-old had idealized Australia. As a young engineering student in Brazil, he was working to develop methods to safely recycle old photovoltaic (PV) solar cells, but when he tried to get them out of the lab, he found himself paralyzed.
“There was no advanced treatment in Brazil,” says Dias. “It was just low-end processing, manual separation, grinding – which you do with very little infrastructure or investment.
“Once I found this out, I started looking for a geographically similar country that had a more advanced e-waste setup.”
His research eventually led him to Australia, which since 2011 had run a sophisticated recycling program called the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme (NTCRS) with the aim of preventing old cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions, laptops and computer accessories. to be landfilled. .
On paper the program was impressive, but in the app Dias found it to be a good logistics operation that was abandoned by a lack of follow-up.
“What I discovered slowly but surely was that Australia didn’t have advanced treatment either,” says Dias. “You do all this work, you have all this legislation, you have everything in place to achieve the same thing that we have in Brazil without legislation, only because our [labour] the market is cheaper.
“Define and forget”
To date, the NTCRS has diverted 290,000 tonnes of e-waste from landfills, but a series of shortcomings, a government ‘set and forget’ approach and ‘light’ regulation have left the system neglected. .
Some estimates now predict that more than 100,000 tonnes of solar panel waste will enter the country’s waste stream by 2035, which Australia is doing with its old gadgets and electrical equipment represents a new challenge which the industry, must be dealt with quickly.
Dias says meeting this challenge means first understanding what went wrong – a question he spent 18 months trying to answer when he set out in April 2017 to visit all recyclers across the country to see their operations.
Through his persistence, he managed to visit half of the people working in Australia – usually after signing a nondisclosure agreement that has since lapsed. The others generally refused categorically.
What he found was an industry that was opaque by design. At the top were four organizations known as “co-regulatory agreements” which liaised with the product manufacturers who fund the program and deal directly with the government.
These organizations were responsible for overseeing the work of 31 recyclers operating at the time, but these entities also sometimes doubled as recyclers themselves, creating a confusing mess of overlapping obligations.
Crucially, Australia had very little “downstream capacity” to process these items after they were dismantled. Once collected by the program, items broken down into building blocks – circuit boards, plastic and glass – were until recently sent overseas.
With sufficient time, this became a problem because, due to the design of the program, government regulators had no real direct oversight of the recyclers doing this work – a bug highlighted by a scathing review from the Department of Environment and Energy program in 2017.
“What’s frustrating is that everything could be so much better,” says Dias. “[The NTCRS] system is a good system. It could be so much better with a few more tweaks – almost effortlessly better. All the hard work is there.
“Mountains of electronic waste”
Long-standing issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colorfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) – a non-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste Trade – tried to find out exactly where Australia’s electronic waste was headed.
The group has equipped 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with special brand GPS devices. From that sample, the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped into Officeworks storefronts in the Brisbane metro area.
Hayley Palmer, COO of BAN, was part of the team that followed where they went next. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old baby and a colleague followed the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong, then to an illegal dump in a rural part of Thailand where they spoke to inside.
“I remember being overwhelmed by the smell of burnt electronics,” Palmer said. “The residue odors were still there despite the fact that there was no evidence that anything was happening at the time.”
While the site was not operational during their visit, Palmer said it was indicative of other operations across Southeast Asia where people desperate enough to work in dangerous conditions use toxic chemical processes to wash the circuit boards for their precious metals, then burn what is left. .
Palmer says that since his investigation, the focal point for the illegal e-waste trade has moved from China following a government crackdown when photos of “mountains of e-waste” in Guiyi went global in 2016, say the government officials. industry operators across the region.
Since neighboring countries like Thailand and Vietnam followed suit, Pakistan has recently emerged as the world’s final destination for e-waste.
The road to change
The lack of surveillance closer to home has also had consequences.
In 2020, a stockpile of used lithium batteries caught fire at a recycling facility operated by the MRI e-waste recycling facility in Campbellfield, Victoria. The resulting fire produced poisonous smoke and contaminated a nearby stream in the five hours it took 75 firefighters to bring it under control.
Since then, Victoria’s environmental regulators have laid a total of 36 new charges against the company and its directors, while authorities in New South Wales have announced an investigation after finding nearly 200 tonnes of Used batteries in an MRI warehouse at Warwick Farm in western Sydney. . The IRM is supposed to defend the charges.
The company – which was once a major player in the industry but has since had its operating license canceled – was also jettisoned by Officeworks in 2019 following the BAN investigation. The retailer now works with the Australian New Zealand Recycling Platform (ANZRP).
Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Environment said he was taking compliance with the NTCRS “very seriously” and had introduced several new measures to strengthen the program. .
“The department has launched a new work program focused entirely on e-stewardship solutions. [and] e-waste, ”they said. “The recent cancellation of MRI PSO Pty Ltd is an example of the department’s strong response to cases of serious non-compliance. “
ANZRP chief Warren Overton said the government’s renewed interest in the industry is positive, but some believe things are not changing fast enough.
Over the past 18 months, the federal government has concluded a review of the NTCRS, created the $ 190 million Recycling Modernization Fund (RMF), and introduced an export ban on unprocessed plastic waste that came into effect on 1st of July.
The ban means that while circuit boards containing precious metals can be exported, plastic and glass cannot without further processing.
“Recyclers store [the plastic] for now, ”says Overton. “Are they trying to figure out if the ban is really going to have an impact on their businesses?” It is because there is a glaring lack of [domestic] ability to take that plastic and process it.
One area where Overton would like the government to move faster is expanding the program to include solar PV and other items currently not included like computer modems.
“The solar industry has been following this for 20 years, so we know when these panels are going to come out of the roof or solar farms,” Overton said. “Federal and state governments know this is a problem. They have the numbers, they know that in the next two to three years we are going to be hit by a deluge of end-of-life solar panels.
What is a problem for some also represents significant publicity for the 45 plastic recycling projects currently planned across the country, which include companies like Singapore-based eco-tech company Clean Earth Technologies.
The organization’s chief marketing officer, Mark Fowler, said they plan to build a recycling plant to process printed circuit boards in Adelaide by the end of the year.
“We are looking to try to take a stand with a clean technology and a clean process, to recover these materials,” Fowler said. “We can do this in a way that ensures that nothing goes to landfill. “
The proposal is based on a new process invented by Flinders University chemist Justin Chalker that extracts precious metals from circuit boards without hazardous chemicals and combines residual plastic waste with a ‘new’ polymer to create others products.
The goal, according to Fowler, is to create a truly circular economy capable of turning abandoned iPhones into gold, dead laptop motherboards into kitchen countertops, and solar panels into building blocks.
“Getting it right is important,” says Fowler. “If we just let it go to the landfill, it’s a lot of wasted human effort. The amount of stuff you could create is anything you could imagine. There is no limit.
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