E-waste: The Home Front

Disposing of old State of Illinois computers is no small task.  State agencies and offices discard so much electronic equipment that there’s an agency whose job it is to deal with all the old property.  The IL Department of Central Management Services Property Control Division is housed in a warehouse in Springfield.  Walk in the door and a sea of computer monitors, Xerox machines, and printers greets you.  Most of these units will be auctioned to people who will recycle, refurbish, or re-sell them.  It’s the sellers the state is most concerned about because it’s difficult to tell if they are shipping the electronics overseas where they could be scrapped and dumped in rural areas such as Taizhou, China.  According to CMS, more than 90% of outmoded electronic equipment nationwide winds up in landfills or illegal dumps, risking toxic leaks that can pose health dangers.  Now, they say that will change, at least in Illinois. Gov. Blagojevich recently issued an Executive Order requiring State agencies, boards and commissions to safely dispose of e-scrap.

CMS says they will categorize e-scrap into two categories: 
1.) Useful working computer scrap that has value and can be sold to buyers with the hopes that they wouldn’t want to scrap a useful working system
2.) Useless non-working scrap that will not get sold and will go straight to a trusted local (state) recycler and scrapped there

This plan doesn’t eliminate the practice of overseas dumping; it just makes it less likely to happen. 

“Until we can control the export market and what’s going overseas, each state is going to have to do what it can to try to minimize the impact and do a better job of policing the environment,” said Curtis Howard, Manager of CMS State and Federal Surplus Property.

So far, only a handful of states, including Illinois have adopted or are seriously considering legislation to control e-waste and keep it in the U.S.