Child Labor in E-Waste

The basis of environmental injustice is the unfair exposure of the defenseless to environmental harm. Perhaps there is no greater injustice than impoverished children around the world who earn pennies a day scavenging scrap metals from heaps of electronic (e-)waste. As part of the so-called informal recycling network, children as young as five years old work full days in the presence of toxic metals and dangerous chemical solvents without basic health and safety precautions. What social and economic conditions allow this problem to exist? What obstacles need surmounting to remedy child labor in e-waste? Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry¹ provides some reasons and insight.

Old televisions are broken up for parts in Tijuana, Mexico. Used batteries are hammered apart for metals recovery in Dhaka, Bangladesh². Circuit board scrap metal is collected in Delhi, India. Circuit boards are disassembled in Guiyu, China. Rural migrants travel to cities in hopes of better jobs and are absorbed into e-waste recycling because the skills needed for entry are low. Dealers often provide shelter for workers who have nowhere else to go. Both parents’ low wages in factories or scrap yards often do not cover the family’s basic needs, so the children are sent to work, too.

Producers of electronics avoid responsibility for their waste by passing liability along with the physical e-waste from formal to informal networks (p.237). Disposal costs are externalized in illegal exports, creating disincentives for toxics elimination during production (p.230). On the importer side, weaker economies lack institutional capacities for protecting workers (p.229). Hazardous e-waste work occurs in unregistered, often hidden parts of industrial or residential areas and is difficult to regulate. Although employing children is illegal nearly everywhere, local authorities do not enforce the laws because they understand child workers supply cheap labor for employers.

International agreements have done little to stop the harmful practices of child labor in e-waste. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, tariffs on importing used computer equipment were eliminated in 1994 (p.158). In the same year, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Disposal Ban Amendment called for the halt of all exports of hazardous wastes from developed to developing countries (p.227). However, a well-established and lucrative system of international trading in e-wastes still exists and is supported by dealers, international banking, shipping, customs, recycling industry associations, and electronics industry bodies. Government bans on exporting/importing of e-wastes cannot do much because of weak enforcement capacity.

The e-waste situation requires creative solutions on the producer side. Market-based instruments emphasizing the “polluter-pays principle,”³ like steep e-waste taxes, would encourage electronics producers to design alternatives to toxics in their products. Extended producer responsibility policies would also help internalize costs, potentially reducing downstream impacts on the e-waste trade and child laborers.

~Mark Bremer, Green Explored Contributor

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[1] Smith, T., Sonnenfeld, D., Pellow, D. Hightower, J (2006). Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, Pa.

[2] Nick Owens. Children of the Black Hole. Sunday Mirror. 9/9/07.

[3] Carter, Neil (2007). The politics of the environments: ideas, activism, policy. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. p.332-3.

Doomed to Perpetuate Environmental Injustice?

As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Are we doomed to perpetuate environmental injustices of the past? In Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline¹, authors Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss documented the struggles of two low-income, ethnic minority Louisiana communities plagued by toxic contamination. The residents of Grand Bois couldn’t stop oilfield wastes from being dumped in open pits outside their town. Gordon Plaza residents were unable to gain relocation compensation or a proper cleanup of toxic landfill contaminants. Local and state governments were unwilling or unable to change laws or regulations to protect communities affected by existing contamination. These communities also didn’t have enough outside help from national organizations or media attention to pressure governments to change. Class-action law suits didn’t get them what they wanted either. They are still trapped.

The fact that residents of Grand Bois and Gordon Plaza were allowed to be exposed to toxic contaminants is a testament to corporate greed and ineffectual government oversight. The Environmental Protection Agency passed responsibility for regulating oilfield waste down to the states. Louisiana determined these toxic wastes to be non-hazardous (p.146). Oil firms found rural Louisiana was a cheap place to dump their drilling fluids without having to pay for disposal of hazardous waste. In the former Agricultural Street landfill case, local government officials had ties with those who benefitted financially from the public housing construction deal. Developers of the Gordon Plaza neighborhood failed to adequately cover the site with sand prior to construction, which cut costs and increased short-term profits (p.171). Government officials never ordered testing of the soil for contaminants prior to construction. Corporations and governments colluded in allowing these contaminations to occur.

Class-action legal approaches didn’t work in contamination cases partly because communities let the lawyers handle the cases alone. “Lawyers need protests and activism to keep the lawsuits moving” (p.207). Support from national organizations allowed other communities fighting environmental injustices cited in Chronicles to put pressure on government agencies to make regulatory changes. Sustained media coverage helped expose cases of injustice and pressure politicians for solutions. Of course, class-action legal settlement outcomes were sealed by request of the defendants, frustrating further organizing and future cases (p.163, 207).

Legal backlashes occurred due to the contamination fights in Louisiana, making it even more difficult for victims of existing contamination to gain relief. Business and government leaders conspired to limit low-income client access to Tulane University environmental law clinic (p.201). Governor Foster worked with the Louisiana legislature to pass an oil industry-sponsored bill that stopped the ability of plaintiffs to sue for medical monitoring expenses (p.162). Then Louisiana Senate Bill 709 passed, preventing researchers from withholding data from public health officials (p.153). This backlash was a reaction to Louisiana State University researcher Dr. Patricia Williams' decision not to share medical information collected during her independent study of heavy metal poisoning in the residents of Grand Bois.

Communities that gained outside help from national organizations and substantial national press coverage were successful in stopping proposed siting of polluting facilities. However, where contamination had already occurred, residents were unsuccessful in changing existing regulations to get relief and encountered serious legal setbacks as a result (p.210). It seems once the pollution occurs, the economic and political interests of the business and government elite is too strong to overcome. For the residents of Grand Bois and Gordon Plaza, environmental injustice still lingers.

~Mark Bremer, Green Explored Contributor

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[1] Roberts, J. Timmons, & Melissa Toffolon-Weiss. 2001. Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Power Plays in Environmental Justice

How do dimensions of power affect the outcomes of environmental justice cases? In Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline, authors Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss make the point that environmental protest movements prove successful only when the powerful stakeholders in a conflict disagree¹. This idea supports the neo-pluralist ‘grand majority’ theory that businesses have a privileged position “affecting significant economic interests over which the public can exercise only limited influence.”² I would argue, however, that this only partially explains the policy outcome that took place in the Louisiana Energy Services (LES) consortium’s failed attempt to build a uranium enrichment facility between two rural black communities in Clairborne Parish, LA in 1994. Pressure from environmental protests played an important role in fragmenting the producer-government coalition of power, causing delays in decision-making that eventually killed the project.

According to neo-pluralist theory, businesses not only “exercise power through their ability to mobilize resources in the political arena,” but also contain structural power due to their importance in the capitalist economy³. LES certainly had insider status while lobbying Louisiana Senator Johnston, Chairman of the Energy Committee, for privatization of enriched uranium supply. In addition, the town’s leaders were businessmen on the Industrial Development Board who recruited LES for development of the facility. Furthermore, Louisiana policy is so growth-oriented that new factories are granted a ten-year exemption on property tax payments⁴. Yet despite all of the powerful interests in favor of development, environmental racism concerns brought out by protest pressure, along with economic deterioration of the proposal over time, shifted the position of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission against permitting the facility.

Another dimension of power at play in the LES case involves the neo-Marxist theory that the ruling elite define issues in ways that produce a systematic bias in favor of capitalist accumulation². Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss point out that a paradox repeatedly arises where “environmental justice rulings can hurt the communities they seek to protect by undermining job creation efforts.”⁵ The ideology that only economic growth is a priority in community governance is pervasive in our capitalist society. The fact that many people in Clairborne Parish wrote letters in favor of the LES facility because of the potential for job creation shows that political institutions have succeeded in shaping citizen preferences to reflect the interests of capital.² However, a small group of dedicated citizens in Clairborne Parish, with the help and resources of the NAACP and Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, were able to delay and eventually overcome the powerful elite’s bias toward development. The power narrative for environmental justice cases was forever altered by the LES case, despite the authors’ downplaying its importance.

~Mark Bremer, Green Explored Contributor

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[1] Roberts, J. Timmons, & Melissa Toffolon-Weiss. 2001. Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p.87)

[2] Carter, Neil. 2007. The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p.185)

[3] Carter, Neil. 2007. The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p.184)

[4] Roberts, J. Timmons, & Melissa Toffolon-Weiss. 2001. Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p.69)

[5] Roberts, J. Timmons, & Melissa Toffolon-Weiss. 2001. Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p.92)