W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

What did your children look at longer yesterday: you or a CRT (cathode ray tube, or "picture tube" of a TV or computer monitor)?

The CRT would be a safe bet. A 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation study found that children spent an average of five and a half hours a day - a whopping 38.5 hours a week - ogling the fare on a "boob tube." What is even more surprising - at least to me - is that the study found that 65% of kids aged 8 years and older have TVs in their bedroom. Who says familiarity breeds contempt?

Why should you or I, as solid waste professionals, care? According to the State of California (as well as the States of Massachusetts and Florida), it is not only some of the weird content shown on TV, acted out in computer games, or extolled on Web sites that can harm your children. No, indeed. The danger is far more immediate and physical and even worse than exposure to half-empty containers of household pesticides or oven cleaner. That's because in some parts of the country CRTs are considered a hazardous waste when "spent" and not in "continued use."

On March 20, 2001, in a formal letter, Peggy Harris, P.E., chief of the California Regulatory Programs Division's Hazardous Waste Management Program with the Department of Toxic Substances Control, noted that CRT glass contains concentrations of lead, causing it to exhibit the characteristic of toxicity under both federal and state law. In addition, a lot of CRT glass contains high levels of barium. Therefore, Harris conspicuously concluded - not once, but twice - that when discarded, CRTs are identified as a hazardous waste, and therefore "the disposal of waste CRTs in municipal landfills has always been prohibited in California" and, of course, continued to be - even though most landfill managers didn't realize it.

Further, Harris reminded us all that California law did not contain exemptions for household or small-quantity generators. Thus, all households, charities, and small recyclers that found themselves in possession of at least one "spent" CRT would have to manage it as a full-fledged hazardous waste in "accordance with all applicable requirements, including generator, transporter and facility requirements," a brain-numbing cacophony of very complex and even more expensive mandatory safeguards.

Thus, when I arrived in California on March 30, 2001, the sound of jaws dropping still was plainly audible.

One reason for the shock among waste managers is that once again the regulatory horse is following the industry's cart - a cart clearly sporting a spiffy new engine. Several studies have concluded the obvious: The faster the pace of innovation, the sooner your brand-new computer platform will no longer be state of the art. Estimates vary, but there seems to be a consensus that by 2005 some 300 million personal computers manufactured after 1985 will be obsolete.

Leaving aside the thorny issues of how you determine when a computer or a television is obsolete if it is still running and how you collect accurate data from tens of thousands of small businesses and charities, what's going to happen to all these electronic units that will no longer be used at their first home?

Stanford Resources Inc., in a "baseline report" for the National Safety Council, collected data from 123 firms and concluded through the wonders of numbers that of the 20.6 million units that became obsolete in 1998, only 2.3 million - or 11% - were "recycled" - meaning for this study that they were donated to schools or charities, repaired and/or refurbished, and put back to work in a new location. What about the other 89%? Some were smelted for heavy metals and other valuables (not considered "recycling" for the NSC study) while others found themselves in landfills. But everyone seems to agree that the vast majority still are stored in home basements or attics or in office storerooms. This is due to what the Garbage Project calls the "Pack Rat Syndrome": Americans hate to throw anything away when it still works, and people buy new computers for new capabilities and features, not because the old one breaks.

Despite the pack rat in so many of us, discard is just a matter of time. It is the image of stored CRTs poised to be unleashed as a tidal wave that has regulators so worried.

I, however, am not so worried. After storing it carefully for four years, I am now ready to dispose of my IBM ThinkPad 755C laptop. I will send this antique to a school for Tibetan refugee children in Nepal. It will no doubt have quite an adventure there. But I also looked up electronics recycling on the Internet for San Francisco and found 228 entries. While nearly half were small businesses, more than half (122) were charities; there were 40 Salvation Army stores alone.

Considering CRTs a hazardous waste suddenly created a severe problem in this rather idyllic scene. Most small businesses and charities don't have and can't afford to buy all of the bells and whistles and special storage facilities and equipment necessary to properly handle a confirmed hazardous waste. That's not such a big problem for large corporations that can afford all of the trimmings when donating a large number of still-functioning PCs to nearby schools, but it will wreak havoc on the current "recycling" of CRTs through small fries - the place where most not-in-continued-use home computers are (or, in California, were) likely to wind up.

This, then, was the problem in a nutshell: If CRTs must be treated as a hazardous waste, it will be much more difficult to find a means to repair/refurbish them for reuse. Householders with no reputable outlet might take to dumping old TVs and PCs beside the road or stuffing the unwanted objects into the bottom of trashcans that are picked up and dumped by mechanized systems.

But why are we in this bind? In what way are CRTs so hazardous? Aren't you a little worried about your child - or even yourself - spending so much time in close proximity to a verifiable hazardous waste?

While some hazardous wastes are never tested, CRTs were subjected to the Environmental Protection Agency's standard toxicity test - the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure, which was designed to simulate leaching conditions that might exist in landfills.

To get down to cases, Professor Tim Townsend and graduate student Steve Musson of the University of Florida's Department of Environmental Engineering collected 36 CRTs. They used a diamond-tipped Dremel tool to grind the CRTs into very small pieces - the largest less than half an inch in size. Next, these pieces were placed in an acid solution and tumbled for 18 hours, after which the solution was tested for lead. For 21 of the CRTs, the resulting leachate exceeded the hazardous waste standard of 5 mg of lead per liter, with concentrations averaging 18.5 mg/l.

By the way, the lead is in the glass to protect viewers, such as you and me, from X-rays generated in the picture-making process. Also note that while a variety of toxics used in computer electronics have been identified as replaceable by a nontoxic alternative by consumer and environmental-concern groups, as far as I am aware, this has not been the case with the lead in CRT glass.

Nevertheless, at this point I have to ask myself how the CRTs are going to create a hazard during transportation or even long-term storage. If you dropped one and it broke, you'd have a much higher risk of getting cut by the leaded glass than of getting lead poisoning. Even in landfills, it is hard to envision how CRT will become mightily crushed and tumbled in an acid solution. But keeping CRTs in use or recycling their constituents seems to be a very worthwhile endeavor.

Actually, if you want to talk about risks from TV and PC CRTs, consider those documented for children exposed to computers at school and to computers and TVs at home:

• Child obesity has been linked to watching CRTs more than five hours a day.
• Playing violent computer games has been linked, especially among boys, to increased aggression.
• There is a significant danger of musculoskeletal injuries if workstations are not specially designed for children.
• There are a variety of physical symptoms that the American Optometric Association has lumped together as a significant disability called Computer Vision Syndrome.

All of these seem like much more meaningful risk factors in our society today than not treating CRTs as a full-blown hazardous waste. As a result, I am glad to report that following a storm of protests, the State of California now considers CRTs a special waste that, when being transported or refurbished for reuse, does not require anything more than normal safe handling.

Sometimes the system works the way it is supposed to work.

Contributing Ediotr W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - January/February 2004