E-Stewardship Taking Responsibility in the Information Age

While producing a corporate video some years ago, I conducted a series of interviews with a diverse group of employees of a major telecom company across a five-state region stretching from New Jersey to Illinois. To arrange the interviews, I worked with a variety of community relations managers who escorted me from facility to facility so I could set up my camera and ask a few questions. But only once did this involve a giant telephone that would fit comfortably in the palm of King Kong’s paw.

Somewhere in central Indiana, I found myself following a company representative with a gigantic red telephone hitched to his car. The phone was used for community parades and other events, but it made for a strange sight flying down a rural road between rows of cornfields on the way to a meeting.

So while I drove, I grabbed the video camera and shot some footage. The little clip of the big phone zipping along the highway wound up being used in a series of corporate conferences where a collection of employee faces appeared on a huge screen behind the CEO while he spoke. After one such event in Chicago, the CEO told me he could always tell when the video behind his back transferred from the friendly faces to the big telephone because the audience always laughed.

“I could be talking about anything – good news or bad – and the audiences would always react the same way,” he told me.

Today there is a venue for funny, unusual or otherwise remarkable videos that reaches far beyond the 5,000 people who witnessed the flying phone all those years ago. It’s called YouTube and it grabs the attention of 83 million unique viewers every month.

Redemtech is featured prominently in a new video on YouTube. The video was produced by the Basel Action Network (BAN) and highlights the serious efforts by reputable electronics recyclers to combat the severe environmental and health damage inflicted by illegal imports of e-waste by disreputable vendors. The BAN video depicts deplorable scenes of tragedy wrought by e-waste dumping and the subsequent industry that sprung up in one Chinese village where indigent workers disassemble electronics despite the health and environmental impact of handling toxic materials.

While it has to compete with finger-biting babies, dancing parakeets and parodies of The Office, the BAN video is getting some good play and perhaps creating greater awareness of the e-waste crisis that continues to grow worse each day. Despite some of the heartbreaking images, the tone and message of the BAN video is positive – because it seeks to show that all is not lost. As long as there are reputable companies devoting all of their energies and expertise to managing e-waste properly, there is hope. Hope that businesses that fraudulently claim to properly dispose of e-waste and then dump it in developing nations will be overwhelmed by true stewards of the global environment.

The Basel Action Network and the Electronics TakeBack Coalition also has launched an e-waste certification program designed to prohibit export of toxic e-waste to developing countries. Redemtech is one of the founding e-Stewards. The e-Steward Initiative will represent the first independently audited and accredited e-waste recycler certification program forbidding the dumping of toxic e-waste in developing countries, local landfills and incinerators; the use of prison labor; and the unauthorized release of private data.

If you’d like to see the BAN video in which Redemtech plays a role, please visit YouTube here. The video also is available on Redemtech’s website here.