The lifeless printer had one final task, and that task was to betray.
Concealed within its frame lay a GPS tracker equipped with its own SIM card, designed to activate every 24 hours, determine its location via satellite, report back to a server, and then go dormant again, as a feature on urbanNext detailed the concept. After a recycler in Massachusetts took possession of the printer, it made its way to another recycler in Vermont, then to the Chicago vicinity, and finally across the Pacific to an e-waste dump in Hong Kong’s New Territories, as TIME reported.
This printer was among 205.
From July 2014 to February 2016, the Basel Action Network, a watchdog from Seattle known as BAN, placed trackers in old printers and computer monitors and left them at charitable organizations and recyclers throughout the United States. The results appeared in a 2016 report boldly titled Scam Recycling, and the MIT Senseable City Lab, which developed the tracking technique, transformed the daily signals into an interactive map illustrating all 205 trajectories.
Where the exported devices ended up
Sixty-nine trackers traveled beyond a national border. The report indicated that of the devices given to American recyclers, 40 percent ended up overseas. Hong Kong received 37, mainland China 11, Taiwan five, Pakistan four, and Mexico three. Thailand and Canada accounted for two each, while individual devices appeared in the United Arab Emirates, Togo, Kenya, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic.
Some traveled nearly 19,000 kilometers, according to PBS NewsHour and EarthFix. BAN traced the arrivals in Hong Kong to 48 distinct locations in the New Territories, an older agricultural area near the mainland border.
Hong Kong used to be a transit point. Much of this waste had long been transported deeper into mainland China, with Guiyu, a collection of villages in Guangdong province, being the most infamous destination. BAN’s executive director, Jim Puckett, told PBS that a Chinese border crackdown known as Green Fence made it much more difficult to pass whole devices through, leading the Hong Kong yards to commence dismantling the devices themselves.
Inside the New Territories scrapyards
High above the Pacific, Puckett spent his flight peering at orange dots on a satellite map while the other passengers dozed. The next morning, he followed those dots down bumpy dirt paths until his receiver indicated the distance to a barrier constructed from old shipping containers. The sound of power drills echoed from the other side, interrupted by the shattering of glass.
Inside, workers were manually disassembling LCD televisions. Broken fluorescent tubes, the slim lights that once illuminated those screens from behind, were scattered across the floor, releasing mercury vapors when shattered. No one was wearing a mask. In another yard, printers were piled approximately four and a half meters high over a lot roughly the size of a football field, and the individuals breaking them apart were coated in black toner, a substance associated with respiratory issues.
“People deserve to know where their items go,” Puckett stated.
Why shipping beat recycling
“They were aware their actions were unethical.” So stated a manager at Washington’s Department of Ecology in September 2016, when the agency fined Total Reclaim, a prominent Seattle electronics recycler, US$444,000. BAN’s trackers had traced the company’s flat screens to Hong Kong, and the company’s own records indicated the shipments dated back seven years. PBS reported that Total Reclaim had been a founding member of e-Stewards, the green certification program established by BAN itself.
Financial factors largely explain this situation. Commodity prices had declined significantly, with copper at half its 2011 price and, according to the co-owner, steel dropping from US$300 to US$60.