Becoming an e-Steward for Your Native Country

I was all set to pick up from my last item and talk about what makes up the corporate computer, but last week I attended a briefing during my first-ever visit to the state of Washington, and I feel I just need to vent a little about the two new standards in this industry, R2 and e-Stewards. (Get a comparison of ISRI’s R2 standard and BAN’s e-Stewards Standard here.) I won’t mention the name of the giant software company I visited, because you can probably guess which one it might be.

 

What surprised me most about this meeting involved the speaker who talked about recycling. When questioned about his company’s position concerning the two recycling standards, he hadn’t even heard of the standards let alone could he provide an official company position.

 

I happened to stay a couple days extra, since I had not visited the state and wanted to understand what makes it unique. I thought the beauty of the state lay mostly in its abundant natural resources. I also had some time to walk around the company’s campus. What I really noticed was the diversity of the people who work for this company (they appear to come from all over the world). Most likely, these were some of the smartest individuals in their countries who had come to America and were now working for this company.

Why would these employees care about the export of our e-waste to developing countries, I asked myself? If the one person in the company who should have known about the e-waste recycling standards did not, then how were the rest of the employees of that company supposed to act? Do they really care about this issue as it relates to their native countries?

 

They are now living the American dream, working for a top-tier company. Do you think they could demand from their employer that it take the right position? It occurred to me that perhaps they have been used to the practice of not bucking the system to get to where they are today.

 

But how wrong they are. When I took an extra day to visit nearby Mount Rainier, I began to understand what a wonderfully wise and progressive act it was a century ago for individuals in our own government to declare the area a national park, long before the public expected such things. Without that protection, logging companies would have destroyed this natural habitat. It’s a treasure that should be protected, just as natural wonders in other countries should be protected against the harm caused by our electronic waste, when it’s disposed of irresponsibly.

After all, the people at this company are among the smartest people in the world, and if they want to do something to help the environment, they need to organize and begin to demand that the electronic scrap within their company not be used to destroy those countries. Smart, responsible people must begin thinking ahead to the future and to the resources future generations will need, rather than simply focusing on short-term profits.

 

Perhaps all these smart people lack is leadership from within to begin to demand that at least their company follow the International Basel Treaty, which protects their natural resources, just as our government saw fit to protect nature with the establishment of national parks in the early 1900s.

 

As I toured that lovely corporate campus, I thought about how easy it was for those ambitious immigrants to avoid thinking about their native countries and the damage that irresponsible e-waste dumping was having on their friends and families who remain behind. The right kind of policy governing the export of electronic scrap to many of these employee’s home countries is the right thing to do. By demanding that natural resources be protected with responsible electronic recycling under international standards, these smart and capable people could actually become e-Stewards for their native countries.