‘Recycling” Companies and the Dillinger Myth

Notorious criminal John Dillinger was in the headlines again recently, 75 years after he was gunned down in an alley near the Biograph Theater in Chicago. The release of a new movie romanticizing Dillinger and his criminal career brought back a lot of memories for me. No, I wasn’t around when Dillinger originally made headlines, but I had the good fortune to work as a newspaper reporter in one of the small towns whose bank was hit by the Dillinger gang back in 1934.

For an article commemorating the 50th anniversary of that robbery, I interviewed all of the survivors I could find of that memorable day in the town’s history, along with some relatives of other eyewitnesses. I heard fascinating stories of how Dillinger and Homer Van Meter strolled into the bank through an adjacent drug store with machine guns hidden under their overcoats. In the course of the robbery, they sprayed the bank and its mezzanine with bullets and escaped by using bank employees as human shields whom they forced onto the running boards of their black Ford getaway car to discourage return gunfire. The robbers reportedly stole more than $17,000 and, in the process, seriously wounded the chief of police who had attempted to thwart the robbery.

It was quite a story these folks related, many of them sharing minute details as if it had just happened the day before. The day after I saw the new Dillinger movie, Public Enemies, I was struck by the way Hollywood recreates history, changing chronologies of events to suit their own dramatic timeline, glossing over facts and turning a 1930s thug into a cinematic hero. Not that Johnny Depp doesn’t create an imposing, intriguing character in the movie, but it just wasn’t the story I’d hoped a new movie about Dillinger would convey.

The action-packed tale depicted in the movie didn’t seem to match the level of nervous excitement still expressed by witnesses of Dillinger’s crimes all those years later. Their blunt opinions of the man behind the Dillinger myth made a big impression on me so that I still remember their words 25 years later, especially because their stories contrast with the Dillinger image presented on the silver screen. To me, the truth was a lot more interesting.

Today it’s hard to figure who’s telling the truth, even when it comes to the industry in which I work. There are a lot of honest, hard-working companies eager to recycle electronics and provide data erasure services so that end-of-lifecycle computers and other hardware don’t wind up breaking local environmental laws and the data they contain doesn’t fall into the hands of modern criminals. Unfortunately, there also are many businesses that promise to do the right thing with the e-waste they collect, and then practice a peculiar sort of honesty that’s more in line with Dillinger’s philosophy toward law and order.

Recently, there have been media reports of several charitable organizations that trusted a so-called electronics recycler that promised to help them raise funds through electronic collection drives. Key to that promise was that the used electronics would be properly managed so that they didn’t wind up in a landfill or shipped overseas to a developing country where dumped electronics become an environmental and health nightmare for the people who live there.

In this particular case, it appears that the recycler didn’t keep its promise and it was discovered that the e-waste collected through the charity drives was headed overseas to be dumped. An investigation set off an alarm bell heard across the industry and various authorities moved in to address the situation.

Just like the innocent bank employees who were held hostage by Dillinger and forced to ride on the running boards to discourage law enforcement and everyday citizens from trying to apprehend the criminals, many organizations today find themselves in the media spotlight by being associated with unscrupulous “recyclers.”

In a recent edition of Greener Computing, Barbara Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics Takeback Coalition (ETBC), accurately summed up the plight of the organizations that participate in increasingly common free e-waste collection drives. "When it comes to these public collection events where people can take their stuff in for free, and which are not paid for by state programs ... Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing [by bringing their electronics in for recycling], but people have no idea that these are going on a container and going overseas," she said.

While Redemtech strives earnestly to represent the industry with its strict no e-waste exports, no landfill, no incineration, and no prison labor best practices, other companies falsely represent themselves as recyclers to violate all of these rules of decent conduct. They take advantage of the fact that few laws exist in the U.S. for stopping e-waste dumping in developing countries in Africa and Asia.

Can you imagine if there had been no laws in 1934 to punish bank robbers? Dillinger and his cohorts could have continued their crime wave indefinitely. And while the newspapers of the era sometimes depicted Dillinger as a Robin Hood of sorts, striking against the financial institutions that foreclosed on homes and farms of the common worker during the Great Depression, his gang also killed indiscriminately and constantly endangered the same public that was reputed to admire him.

Companies that willingly ship their e-waste to foreign destinations to poison their people, to pollute their land, water and air with toxic waste, differ little from criminals of yesteryear who had little regard for the people they harm. Yet, there is no national law to prevent this practice.

Fortunately, organizations like the Basel Action Network (BAN) and ETBC are spreading the word about companies that are not doing the right thing when it comes to e-waste disposition. Perhaps if enough reputable companies and organizations speak out, new laws can be introduced that put an end to e-waste dumping.

Comments

[Bill R.]

It's sad when companies and organizations want to do the right thing, but the competitive nature of business give them "feet of clay." Even though it shouldn't be required, we all need to follow up to keep the companies we trust to keep them honest.