CM+E-Waste+1AC

New Plan:

THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT SHOULD RULE THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MUST PROVIDE FINANCIAL AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE TO CLEAN UP ELECTRONIC WASTE IN AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA AND MUST FINANCE THE PROGRAM THROUGH A PIGOUVIAN TAX ON UNITED STATES CORPORATIONS THAT SHIP ELECTRONIC WASTE TO AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA ON CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW GROUNDS

Observation One: Inherency

1. eWaste is a growing problem with over 100 million new computers, monitors, and TVs each year John B. Stephenson, Director Natural Resources and Environment, 7-26-05, GAO, Observation on the Role of the Federal Government in Encouraging Recycling and Reuse

Available estimates suggest that the amount of used electronics is large and growing, and that if improperly managed can harm the environment and human health. While data and research are limited, some data suggest that over 100 million computers, monitors, and televisions become obsolete each year, and that this amount is growing. These obsolete products are either recycled, reused, disposed of in landfills, or stored by users in places such as basements, garages, and company warehouses. Available data suggest that most used electronics are probably stored. The units still in storage have the potential to be recycled and reused, or disposed in landfills; or, they may be exported for recycling or reuse overseas. If disposed of in landfills, valuable resources, such as copper, gold, and aluminum, are lost for future use. Additionally, standard regulatory tests show that some toxic substances with known adverse health effects, such as lead, have the potential to leach from discarded electronics into landfills. Although one study suggests that this leaching does not occur in modern U.S. landfills, it appears that many used electronics end up in countries without either modern landfills or with considerably less protective environmental regulations.

2. The problem will not go away; it is just as hassle for American to prevent eWaste John B. Stephenson, Director Natural Resources and Environment, 7-26-05, GAO, Observation on the Role of the Federal Government in Encouraging Recycling and Reuse

Economic factors, such as cost, inhibit the recycling and reuse of used electronics. Consumers generally have to pay fees and drop off their used electronics at often inconvenient locations to have their used electronics recycled or refurbished for reuse. Consumers in Snohomish County, Washington, for instance, may have to travel more than an hour to the nearest drop-off location, which then charges between $10 and $27 per unit, depending on the type and size of the product. Recyclers and refurbishers charge these fees because costs associated with their processes outweigh the revenue received from recycled commodities or refurbished units. In addition to the challenges posed by these economic factors, federal regulatory requirements provide little incentive for environmentally preferable management of used electronics. The governing statute, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, regulates the disposal practices of large generators of hazardous waste (including electronic waste) but exempts individuals and households from these requirements.

Observation Two: Harms – We isolate three advantages Sub-point A is biodiversity

Without waste management we cannot have clean air, water, and food The Basel Action Network, 8-24-06, Executive summary, “The Digital Dump”

At the same time as the illegitimate trade is quashed, Nigeria and other developing countries must be assisted in creating environmentally sound waste management systems. This effort should in no way be linked to the unsustainable exports of hazardous wastes to them, but rather as a necessity for any country that must deal with all kind of wastes. Adequate waste management is as vital to a society as clean air, clean water and clean food, for today, without it, we will have none of these things we have taken for granted since the beginning of time.

Contamination decreases biodiversity by increased genetic mutations, decreasing heritable genes, and decreasing genetic diversity John W. Bickham, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences @ Texas A & M, 12-99, Mutation Research 463

The conservation of genetic diversity has emerged as one of the central issues in conservation biology. Although researchers in the areas of evolutionary biology, population management, and conservation biology routinely investigate genetic variability in natural populations, only a handful of studies have addressed the effects of chemical contamination on population genetics. Chemical contamination can cause population reduction by the effects of somatic and heritable mutations, as well as non-genetic modes of toxicity. Stochastic processes in small populations, increased mutation load, and the phenomenon of mutational meltdown are compounding factors that cause reduced fitness and accelerate the process of population extirpation. Although the original damage caused by chemical contaminants is at the molecular level, there are emergent effects at the level of populations, such as the loss of genetic diversity, that are not predictable based solely on knowledge of the mechanism of toxicity of the chemical contaminants. Therefore, the study of evolutionary toxicology, which encompasses the population-genetic effects of environmental contaminants, should be an important focus of ecotoxicology. This paper reviews the issues surrounding the genetic effects of pollution, summarizes the technical approaches that can be used to address these issues, and provides examples of studies that have addressed some of them.

Loss of each species risks ecological collapse and human extinction David Diner, Ohio State University J.D, Winter 1994, Military Law Review 161,“The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who’s Endangering Whom?” Lexis

By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wing, mankind may be edging closer to the abyss. Sub-point B is Health –

Loss of biodiversity decreases the quality of human life John W. Bickham, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences @ Texas A & M, 12-99, Mutation Research 463

Although direct linkages between ecological effects and human health have proven difficult to establish, the use of wildlife species as sentinels of environmental problems is the conceptual basis for his connection w6x. Scientists, resource managers, and medical experts today widely accept the idea that human society is dependent upon a healthy environment and that continued environmental degradation threatens the quality of life. Recent concern has developed over the potential chronic and transgenerational effects of environmental contamination. This has resulted in part from the remarkable findings that many chemicals act as endocrine disruptors and mimics, and that human sperm counts may have declined by as much as 50% in many industrialized countries over the past few decades. Such issues are bound to have a profound impact on wildlife and human health.

eWaste poisons the food and water supply Liz Carney, staff writer, 12-19-06, BBC World Service, Nigeria fears e-waste 'toxic legacy' Meanwhile, the tips sit on swamp land, which increases the environmental risk as chemicals seep into the high water table. Old computers can contain mercury, and heavy metals like nickel, cadmium and chromium. Plastic casings use flame retardant chemicals and monitors contain lead. Professor OladDele Osibjano of the University of Ibadan warns that overall, dumping e-waste is creating a toxic legacy. "We've found excess heavy metals in the soil, as well as in plants and people who eat vegetables," he says. "That has a lot of social health implications. You have grazing animals, people picking vegetables and eating them, and then the drinking water containing [these toxins]." The international Basel Convention is meant to regulate and control the movement of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries - but it can be difficult to enforce. For a start, the US - where many of the second hand computers come from - has not signed the convention. European countries have - but a recent study revealed 48% of spot checks on exports of various waste shipments showed they were illegal.

Toxic dumping hospitalizes thousands and leaves Africa as the global septic task holding radioactive and hazardous Charles W. Schmidt, National Association of Science Writers, April 2002, Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 110, Number 4 Here’s a story that will curl your toes. In August, a rusted Greek tanker named the Probo Koala, stopped in the Ivory Coast. The ship had been turned away from several European ports because of its toxic cargo. In the middle of the night, the crew illegally unloaded 500 tons of toxic caustic soda in 12 sites around the city of Abidjan. The resulting fumes sent 40,000 people in search of medical care for respiratory problems, nosebleeds, and nausea. Eight people were fatally poisoned and thousands fled the coast and moved into the rainforest to escape the fumes. The tragedy led Senegalese ecologist, Haidar al-Ali, to remark: “We talk of globalisation, of the global village, but here in Africa we are under the impression of being that village’s septic tank.” Tighter regulation on toxic waste across Europe has given rise to a new class of black-market "garbage cowboys." They haul away computer parts, radioactive waste, pig dung, cell phones, and just about anything else the rest of the world doesn't want and dump it on Africa's doorstep. The practice is ravaging much of coastal Africa. The UNDP estimates that it costs about $2.50 to dispose of a metric tonne of material in Africa—far cheaper than the $250 it costs in Europe. Western chemical and energy companies have been dumping their waste products off the coast of Somalia since the early 1980s, taking advantage of the ravaged African nation’s broken government. Fast forward to 2004 when the tsunami hit Somalia’s coast. The Sunday Herald of Scotland, reports: …along more than 400 miles of shoreline, the turbo-charged wave churned up reinforced containers of hazardous toxic waste that European companies had been dumping a short distance offshore for more than a decade, taking advantage of the fact that there was not even a pretend authority in the African “failed state”. The force of the tsunami broke open some of the containers which held radioactive nuclear waste, lead, cadmium, mercury, flame retardants, hospital waste and cocktails of other deadly residues of Europe’s industrial processes.

Trade is just a façade to justify the egregious irresponsibility of richer nations contaminating poorer nations. Daily Champion, December 7, 2006, Nigeria; Nigeria As E-Waste Dump, Lexis.

THE cynical and dangerous habit of using Africa as a waste dump by western nations has moved into the area of electronic waste which increasingly is finding its way into African countries. A particularly alarming statistic says that about 100,000 computers are entering into Nigeria's Apapa Lagos Port on a monthly basis. This would have been good news except for the fact that about 75 per cent of these items are mere junk. Revealing this at the opening of the 18th conference of parties to the Basel Convention on environment in Kenya, the head of United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), Mr Achim Steiner, observed that "if these were good quality, second hand pieces of equipment, this would perhaps be a positive trade of importance for development." Instead, Mr Steiner said, "these items like old T.Vs, CPUs, phones, lap-tops are nothing but electronic waste (e-waste) exported by devious developed countries' consumers and companies to an African rubbish tip or land-fill". The danger is that, if not checked, these junk electronic instruments which contain lead, cadmium, mercury and other hazardous heavy metals will end up fouling up water sources in Africa in addition to other hazards. The world's richest nations are guilty of this chemical poisoning of Africa and Nigeria in particular with their obsession with production methods that leave behind dangerous waste which they illegally dump in Africa in the guise of trade

Lack of clean water and sanitation is a form of structural violence driven by legacies of colonialism and present day corporations. Joia S Mukherjee. Medical Director of Partners in Health. 2007. “Structural Violence, Poverty and the AIDS Pandemic” http://www.palgrave-journals.com/development/journal/v50/n2/full/1100376a.html Current global inequalities are often the legacies of oppression, colonialism and slavery, and are today perpetuated by radical, market-driven international financial policies that foment poor health. Neo-liberal economic 'reforms' imposed on poor countries by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank force poor governments, as the recipients of qualified loans, to decrease their public sector budgets, privatize health services and, when they would rather invest their minuscule capital to protect their vulnerable citizens and educate their children, these recipient countries are instead forced to march in lock step toward the 'free' market, enforcing policies such as user fees for health and primary education. In poor countries, revitalizing the public health infrastructure and improving the delivery of essentials such as vaccination, sanitation and clean water are critical aspects to remediating the structural violence that underlies disease. It is only with ongoing, large-scale international assistance that poor governments will be able to address the right to health in a sustained way. Advocacy to redress the violations of the basic right to health must recognize that more money is needed for health now, and for decades to come. Furthermore, the coercion by international financial institutions of poor governments to restrict health spending only serves to deepen inequalities in health care and perpetuate social injustice.

Sub-point B is Consumerism/Neoliberalism –

Consumerism and its inherent obsolescence drives the e-waste problem. Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, Dec. 2, 2006, WORLD IN FOCUS; E-waste@large in Africa, The Advertiser, Lexis.

ACCELERATING trade in goods and materials across borders and across continents is one of the defining features of the early 21st century. Another is the globalised phenomenon of consumerism and what one might call built-in obsolescence, the relative cheapness of high-technology products like mobile phones and computers and the way fashion is driving the purchasing and discarding of products in a way unknown a generation ago. Consumerism is driving economies but also drives a growing mountain of e-waste, with a wide range of pollutants from heavy metals to chlorine compounds. Discarded electronic equipment, or e-waste, is now recognised as the fastest-growing waste stream in the industrialised world. While this new waste stream would be of environmental significance in any case, due to resource and energy consumption, because of widespread use of toxic chemicals in today's hi-tech equipment, such as brominated flame retardants in plastics and circuit boards, beryllium alloys in connectors, lead-tin-based solders, lead- and barium-laden cathode ray tubes, mercury lamps, etc, most of these electronic wastes are hazardous.

eWaste trade follows by neoliberal models Alastair Iles, research fellow at Energy and Resources group and University of California, 11-2004, Global Environmental Politics - Volume 4, Number 4, pp. 76-107, Project Muse

Key reasons why recycling chains now extend from industrial to Asian developing nations include the development priorities of governments, the relative weakness of regulatory and institutional oversight, the appearance of recycling entrepreneurs, and the rise of neoliberal market demands by international financial institutions. Rather than just a “race to the bottom” occurring, where wastes are shipped to the countries with the least regulatory protection and most deplorable economic conditions, the international economy—coupled with local and regional developments—helps channel wastes to countries also endeavoring to reach the top, at least according to neoliberal, industrial development models.

The e-waste “trade” is false symbiosis and altruism. It only further reinforces the North/South, developed/undeveloped, rich/poor binaries. Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, Dec. 2, 2006, WORLD IN FOCUS; E-waste@large in Africa, The Advertiser, Lexis.

Due to the lack of financial resources available to most people in developing countries, much of the growth in the information technology sector in developing countries has been fuelled by the importation of hand-me-down, used equipment from rich, developed countries, whose consumers are all too happy to find buyers for it. As a result, many brokers and businesses have sprung up to channel used equipment from rich to poor. This sounds like it might have the makings of a classic win-win situation, where the north can shovel away much of its growing e-waste mountain that threatens groundwater in landfills and is proving to be a serious burden for local municipalities, and at the same time benefit those who are too poor to afford brand-new equipment. A further claim of victory for the environment could be made, because the cheap labour in developing countries can make repair and re-use of the old equipment feasible, giving it a longer life and forestalling the need for more products to be manufactured. Unfortunately, the Basel Action Network's latest investigation in Lagos, Nigeria, a new hotbed of hi-tech growth and impressive entrepreneurial spirit, reveals these visions to be the stuff of dreams. The reality is that this burgeoning new trade is not driven by altruism but rather by the immense profits that can be made through it, and those involved are oblivious to or unconcerned with its adverse consequences. Too often, justifications of building bridges over the digital divide are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines to some of the poorest communities and countries in the world. While supposedly closing the digital divide, we are opening a digital dump.

Environmental injustice restricts people’s power to choose the environment over money Alastair Iles, research fellow at Energy and Resources group and University of California, 11-2004, Global Environmental Politics - Volume 4, Number 4, pp. 76-107, Project Muse

Environmental justice analyses, however, have become more multi-faceted and theoretically deeper in several ways since the mid-1990s. First, ongoing controversy exists over the meanings and scope of “justice.” Andrew Dobson argues that seeking environmental justice may not achieve social justice.72 Economically poor communities may be politically willing to accept a hazardous waste site because it promises employment and local government income. They perceive jobs as competing with environmental protection. One issue, then, is why Asians should not be able to choose to profit from degradation even if many Westerners would not be willing to. As seen in the e-waste case, economic justice may be important to the village enterprises of China and India. Halting e-waste imports could mean a weakening of efforts to rebuild village economies even if these are ecologically degrading. In response, Low and Gleeson point out that the ability of people to choose is frequently problematical because of underlying power and economic conditions.73 People also lack the perfect information needed to appreciate the full effects of how environmental goods are distributed in a global production system.74

Neo-liberalism legitimizes the destruction of all humanity—it sacrifices whole populations on the altar of market fundamentalist dogma. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra, 03 (Bad Subjects, Issue #63, April, bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html)

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the state and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction.

Neoliberal models of eWaste misinterpret the risk it actually poses Alastair Iles, research fellow at Energy and Resources group and University of California, 11-2004, Global Environmental Politics - Volume 4, Number 4, pp. 76-107, Project Muse

Dominant neoliberal, modernist development models are important in the production of e-waste risks. They not only help generate electronics manufacturing and use within developing countries, but create—or fail to address—an underlying cause of careless e-waste entrepreneurialism in these countries, namely poverty and the absence of alternative, multiple development pathways. As developing countries seek technology to industrialize and provide benefits for their citizens, the resulting technology and materials flows may create new ecological and health problems that result not because of trade between developed and industrial regions, but from activities within developing regions. Conversely, the development models that developing country governments choose to pursue, encouraged or even imposed by international financial agencies and middle class consumption demands, can create conditions conducive to entrepreneurs profiting from e-waste “recycling” by poorly paid workers who lack access to community micro-credit banks or small-scale manufacturing.100 Yet e-wastes—if safely treated—can also provide valuable informal sector opportunities that governments may want to suppress, viewing them as incompatible with modern development.

Thus the plan : The USFG should reinstate the polluter’s pay principle, enforcing a regressive tax and clean up program to all toxic and eWaste sent to sub-Saharan Africa.

Observation Three is solvency –

Polluters Pay solves empirically – it has handled all the toxic waste in America The Pittsburg Post Gazette, 12/12/2005 (Lexis)

The polluter pays to clean up the mess. That principle was the bedrock foundation of the Superfund program when former President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation into law 25 years ago yesterday. However, the polluter-pays clause of the Superfund law expired in 1995, shifting most of the burden for cleaning up toxic waste sites onto taxpayers' shoulders. Congress's refusal to reauthorize that tax has left the Superfund weakened, with an uncertain future. Congress must again make the polluters pay to enable Superfund to continue its traditional work, and tackle new responsibilities. As a PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center report just noted, those include cleaning up toxic pollution left by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Since 1980, Superfund has helped to protect the one in four Americans who live near highly polluted toxic-waste sites. It has cleaned up some 1,000 sites, including messes at New York's Love Canal and Missouri's Times Beach.

Superfund’s success proves that law can even reach small time polluters Barnaby J. Feder, 1991 (The New York Times. Lexis) http://web.lexisnexis.com/universe/document?_m=515895f3812d798f8dcd80461bf1cb62&_docnum=2&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkVA&_md5=51d491860050b29a7e47ea34ae071939

Just as important, many groups -- notably banks and municipalities -- have been stunned by Superfund's reach. The law contains such broad definitions of who can be held liable for cleanup costs that they have found themselves named alongside chemical giants as defendants. Only a few banks have been named so far, but some courts have suggested that simply foreclosing on contaminated property could trigger liability. Municipalities, and hundreds of small businesses that rely on them for waste disposal, have discovered that the small amount of hazardous material in their solid waste is enough to drag them into Superfund cases.

Making companies take responsibility will attack the root cause of eWaste, the products Alastair Iles, research fellow at Energy and Resources group and University of California, 11-2004, Global Environmental Politics - Volume 4, Number 4, pp. 76-107, Project Muse

Since the late 1980s, environmental justice has emerged as a compelling approach to evaluating the distributive and structural effects of human activities on the health and environment of specific populations. Environmental justice is not simply about identifying disadvantaged communities or criticizing unequal treatment in government policies and corporate decisions. The ongoing processes of environmental degradation are driven in part by the existence and creation of inequalities in the resulting impacts. Weakening livelihoods, for example, may intensify pressures to accept ecologically damaging development. Moreover, the global environmental politics of defining problems and shaping change may vary greatly depending on whether actors focus on justice or on something else. The absence of ostensibly local environmental problems such as e-waste from global political agendas may reflect the failure of nations and international agencies to attend to the justice dimensions which would reveal the transnational character of the problems.68 Looking at whether justice is being done may lead to demanding that industry and government take precautionary action aimed at root causes rather than seeking technical solutions that recyclers should implement.

Targeting the manufacture’s assumptions will lead to a clean computer supply Alastair Iles, research fellow at Energy and Resources group and University of California, 11-2004, Global Environmental Politics - Volume 4, Number 4, pp. 76-107, Project Muse

Consequently, it is crucial to target the assumptions of manufacturers in industrial nations regarding whether and how computers can be redesigned to be “greener.” Since 2000, most leading Japanese OEMs have begun to phase out toxics such as lead and cadmium, use more recycled materials, use non-halogen plastics, enhance the recyclability of components, reduce the use of complex plastic-metal components, and procure toxic-free materials.96 Such features, however, are mainly limited to the Japanese market. In August 2002, NEC did release the PowerMate Eco in the US market. This new PC does not use any of 36 potentially toxic chemicals,97 uses NuCycle plastic that is 100% recyclable, contains no toxic flame retardants, and does not emit hazardous substances such as dioxins on being incinerated. Such a computer would greatly reduce the toxic exposures that Asian recyclers and communities currently face. Such design shifts, if in a very early phase, highlight how the global production system can change. The Japanese companies were responding to not only a new domestic law requiring the take-back of electronics and increasing consumer demand for environmentally beneficial products, but also to new global market opportunities created by the EU Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment and the Removal of Hazardous Substances laws.98 Consumption may also create new demand for ecologically sounder computers in industrial nations. American and many Asian manufacturers, however, have not yet acted and may be forced to play “catch-up” to more progressive companies. US companies still emphasize domestic US recycling systems instead of redesign because they do not perceive themselves as liable for the problems appearing in Asia and do not have to compensate or remediate damage such as deteriorating water and food supplies.99