According to environmental experts and those responsible for recycling and disposal at UT, lack of funding and regulation means electronic waste is being disposed of without care and is even having an effect on pollution in developing nations.
    
“Electronic items are not regulated by law, not in this state,” UT environmental coordinator Jay Price said. “There are some states that regulate it. But there are no federal laws that control the disposal of electronic waste.”
    
Price and his assistant, Emmy Waldhart, work within UT’s facility services department on the un-budgeted recycling program. The bulk of electronic waste is sold to the general public through UT’s surplus service facility.
    
“For the most part these items are bought by re-sellers,” said head of surplus Bill Keanaaina. “Now, do these re-sellers handle the items responsibly we don’t know, but unless there are laws that control it we don’t restrict it.”
    
Despite the university pushing its Make Orange Green environmental campaign, it is up to the on-campus environmental safety and health department to provide funds so that Price’s recycling methods can be paid for.
    
“We could definitely use some additional support institutionally,” Price said. “I mean, O.K., we need to recycle as it’s doing ‘x,’ ‘y’ and ‘z’ for the university. And we really haven’t seen that top-down support — here’s a budget, here’s staff, here’s the equipment you need to operate the program.”
    
Neither the university’s recycling nor surplus programs have an operating budget to work with.
    
“You start out at the beginning of the year in a hole and hope by the end of it that you are out of that hole,” Keanaaina said.
    
In order to make up for the shortfall in funding, Price sells material to recycling companies but admits that from there the items can end up anywhere.
    
“There are actually not any contracts, university or state-wide, that provide for the recycling of batteries or electronic waste. There are recycling companies, responsible or otherwise. Some of them have third-party auditors who follow the material trail; the others, well, who knows what happens,” he said. “I can’t control where products end up. I sell recyclable material to the market and from there it could go anywhere.”
   
 Price only recycles the electronic items that Keanaaina cannot sell through the surplus public auctions that take place every six weeks from a warehouse on the outskirts of campus. The items sold in these auctions gain on average 10 percent of their original value, encouraging their purchase by low-end scrap traders.
    
“The highest bidder is awarded the surplus,” Waldhart said. “So they have no control over who is the highest bidder or what the highest bidder does with the material.”
    
But, Keanaaina stressed that it is lack of regulations, both state and federally, that are to blame for any items causing environmental harm both at home and abroad.
    
“When you go out and buy a product, the dealer has no concern over what happens once you have purchased it, whether the batteries go bad or whatever,” he said. “Unless there are legal requirements, licenses or such, then we cannot not sell it to the public.”
    
This lack of regulation not only allows for improper disposal practices but also stops the seller from tracking where the material ends up.
    
“Where a lot of this stuff ends up we don’t really know; that depends on export licenses and at that point it is up to the federal government to regulate. Now, a lot of these items end up in the third world, telephone equipment, etc., because to us this stuff is obsolete,” Keanaaina said. “Now when it gets there, is it handled responsibly? I think some care and some don’t really want to know.”
    
If surplus cannot sell the items, then it is up to Price and Waldhart to find ways to dispose of them safely.
   
 “The items we receive from surplus that can’t be sold, there are no legal requirements for us to dispose of them safely,” Waldhart said. “We do it because we don’t want them ending up in general waste and causing pollution.”
    
Price is worried that lack of funding as well as regulations mean the bulk of electronic waste in the state ends up creating devastating environmental harm.
   
 “For me it’s troublesome that there aren’t federal regulations that say you can’t just throw this stuff into a landfill,” Price said. “Because they do contain lead, they do contain cadmium, they do contain mercury in a lot of instances, and this stuff will end up getting into the environment.”
    
These effects are particularly worrying for those at UT whose work involves researching environmental effects of human pollution.
    
Dr. Gregory Button, professor of anthropology at UT specializing in manmade disasters, described how Waldhart met with him to discuss issues surrounding the university’s disposal of electronic equipment and hazardous waste process.
   
 “We have no idea where these computers and other bits of electronics are going,” Button said. “People just come and buy them by the pallet and ship them out. So we’re just perpetuating the problem.
    
“So the question is, why aren’t we either recycling this stuff on campus, or, better than that, taking the stuff we don’t use and donating it to places who need the equipment such as third-world schools or science facilities who could really use them?”
    
This is an issue that is personal to Button, who lived and worked in the Hangzhou province of China next to a backyard recycling area where families would strip down used batteries and gather the lead to sell to manufacturing plants.
    
He recalled how the children of these families use everyday kitchen utensils to break up the batteries and then the parents would use these to cook and eat with, putting the lead straight into their diet.
    
“More than that, they were doing this right next to an open stream, so the lead was also seeping right into the ecosystem,” Button said. “And will stay there for hundreds of years damaging plant life as well as affecting thousands of other families.”
    
Button’s personal story is supported by research gathered by UT civil engineering professor Chris Cherry.
    
Cherry’s study focused on China and India, where poor manufacturing and recycling practices result in the loss of considerable amounts of lead to the environment.
    
“The fact that most of these other countries lose almost 30 percent of their lead to the environment through informal recycling is just unacceptable,” Cherry said.
    
In order to overcome this, Cherry contends that developing countries need to introduce strong policies, strong economic instruments as well as formalized recycle and take-back systems.
    
His research found that environmentally friendly recycling plants cannot gain access to lead because of backyard smelters who extract lead from used batteries illegally and in unhealthy conditions. He admits it is hard for Western companies to initiate change in developing countries.
    
“There is this notion of producer responsibility. That is, the producer consumes green products and they take care of their waste,” Cherry said. “The problem with some of these developing countries is that these systems are going to rural areas and are off-grid generally.”
    
Cherry’s paper was co-authored by Better Environmental Sustainability Targets (BEST), an industry-supported battery eco-label NGO from San Francisco.
    
“Certain companies, responsible companies, whether they are solar photovoltaic or car companies, will say they will only purchase batteries from producers who will only manufacture according to international standards,” Cherry said.
    
Cherry said he believes this is the best way for the industry to target the problem, as it will give the lead-acid battery sector an incentive to clean up.
    
Those involved in the process at UT believe responsibility cannot be placed at the door of the people who are trying to find a place for the waste to be accepted.
    
“You know, if you put your nose too far into where it doesn’t belong, then, as they say, it’s going to get chopped off,” Keanaaina said. “So sometimes we cannot go outside of the confines of the university.”
    
All parties agree it is up to individual states and the federal government to create laws and regulations in order to overcome the environmental impact of electronic waste disposal.
    
Price said that if the state and university are serious about tackling the issue, then they need to show support by providing adequate funding to a policy that is struggling to cope with the demands placed on it.