Facing pressure from environmental groups and labor unions, California has decided to stop using federal prisoners, paid as little as 20 cents an hour, to dismantle the mountains of potentially hazardous electronic junk discarded by state bureaucrats.
The decision by the California Department of General Services to stop sending electronic waste to federal prisons and to hire a private recycler instead was disclosed a month after Dell, the nation's largest computer maker, canceled a similar prison labor arrangement. Dell's deal also had been fiercely criticized -- conservationists wore striped prison garb at a computer industry event and accused Chief Executive Michael Dell of hiring a "high-tech chain gang."
The defections leave the future of the computer recycling program run by UNICOR -- an arm of the federal government that uses prison inmates in business ventures -- in limbo only months after it seemed poised to become a major player in the emerging business.
As computers become common in homes and workplaces, and consumers upgrade to newer technologies, electronic waste has begun to pile up all over the world, posing a serious environmental problem. Most televisions and monitors contain several pounds of lead apiece, for example, and governments, including California's, have banned them from landfills.
However, recyclers equipped to handle tons of old computers and televisions are relatively scarce and expensive. With a captive work force of prisoners paid far less than the minimum wage, UNICOR began to fill the void, agreeing to accept the material for rock-bottom prices. Critics said UNICOR was undercutting efforts to launch a recycling industry and taking jobs from law-abiding Americans.
"This is great news for the real e-waste recycling industry," Mark Murray, director of the group Californians Against Waste, said of the state's decision. "This is obviously a huge contract," and the decision will enable a private recycler to "make the investments they need for the future."
In a recent report, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental group that has documented the electronic waste problem, condemned the federal prison recycling program. Representatives of the coalition had toured the program's largest operation, the Atwater federal penitentiary. The report, which compared the federal prison operation with a Hewlett-Packard recycling center in Roseville that uses union labor, concluded that inmates were using primitive tools to break apart the computers and monitors, exposing themselves to health hazards.
