Screenshot courtesy of PBS Frontline documentary

Update: A School District spokesman called to clarify several statements: 9/30/09 @ 3:50 p.m.

The latest in an ongoing series on School District of Philadelphia e-waste. Reporter Stephen Zook walked the West African landfill in question to file this report exclusively for Technically Philly.

ACCRA, GHANA — The air stinks of oil, fish and grease, only to be overtaken by that of garbage and sewage. It surrounds you as soon as you near Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood on the outskirts of this West African country’s capital city.

In most of Accra — a coastal city about the size of Philadelphia — open sewers carry little more than rainwater and a few pieces of debris in their troughs. In Agbogbloshie, even after a fresh municipal clean, a milky sludge sits in the sewers, alongside garbage left to dry on the road beside them, probably adding to the stink created by the town’s rambling landfill.

It is there, where many of Agbogbloshie”s children make a living looking for metallic scraps to be sold, that at least one printer from the School District of Philadelphia was found. It was shipped here as part of the growing practice of e-waste from wealthy nations being brought to developing countries, like Ghana. The printer, spotted in a PBS Frontline documentary exposing the e-waste trend and first brought to the fore locally by Technically Philly, created a call to action that has yet to be fulfilled.

City Controller Alan Butkovitz’s office pledged an investigation, and Fox 29 filed their own report, adding pressure to the school district’s vow for their own investigation. Yet three months later, the school district’s investigation is ongoing, says spokesman Vincent Thompson, and little has been resolved by the district itself.

The school district’s contract with Azon Computer and Electronic Recycling, who was handling their technology disposal at the time, did not actually require that the company recycle the equipment it removed from the district’s buildings, according to the city controller’s report.

After repeated calls by Technically Philly, Thompson declined to answer said he was unable to receive comment from the district’s IT department, due to the beginning of the school year, regarding several questions about the district’s current technology contract with Regentech, including how it differs from the one it had with Azon. Thompson didn’t say why Azon’s contract was canceled or discontinued.

Azon no longer exists as a company, and a spokesman for Regentech didn’t return a call for comment. It isn’t clear how Azon disposed of the equipment it removed from the district or how the printer ended up in Agbogbloshie’s landfill.

Thompson, too, declined to comment on the record if the school district had any intention of apologizing to the people of Agbobloshie for being part of the wave of e-waste, and its potentially toxic makeup, that flood their neighborhood.

“The School District can’t apologize if we don’t know if we’re responsible. The investigation is ongoing,” Thompson said in a followup call after this story was published. “We do not tolerate this kind of illegal dumping, that is for sure.”

Still, Agbogbloshie is more than smelly sewers and an infamous e-waste dump. A market, mostly supplied by items salvaged from the massive landfill and fed by Western leftovers, consists of uneven rows of stands lining the neighborhood’s main artery.

Most of the market isn’t quite like others along the southern coast of Ghana; instead of food and fabrics, sales consist more of old metal parts and batteries. Food vendors exist, but the majority sell what look like old car parts. The vendors pick the best of the dated pieces — especially PC terminals and boxy monitors — some looking worse for wear, others that seem fairly new.

Agbogbloshie doesn’t attract many tourists or foreigners generally. Accra market vendors tend to be much more aggressive than Americans are used to — calling, teasing, cajoling, even feigning offense, in order to make a sale. But in Agbogbloshie, the vendors give mostly half-interested glances to foreign faces, sometimes even seeming suspicious or apprehensive.

Only one school district printer was confirmed to have made it to this landfill, but the human and environmental cost of so many people accepting just one more computer becomes clearer the nearer one gets to Agbogbloshie.

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Stephen Zook is a freelance journalist and a senior at Temple University, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of The Temple News. This summer he studied in Accra, Ghana. You can reach him at stephen.zook@gmail.com.

Refurbished computers in a technology recycling warehouse in Fairmount.

How at least one School District of Philadelphia computer monitor ended up in a massive e-waste landfill in Ghana remains unclear.

But, after a PBS Frontline documentary camera spotted the hardware and Technically Philly made repeated followup inquiries, the district has announced it will launch an investigation, according to a written statement given by district spokesman Fernando Gallard.

“The School District of Philadelphia does not encourage or condone the illegal dumping of any school district property anywhere in the world,” read the statement, given first to Technically Philly. “As a result… [we are] currently investigating the source and disposal record of the equipment found in Ghana.”

The computer monitor, which had a district sticker on it, was just a brief moment in the explosive PBS Frontline report on e-waste that was released last month. Likewise, the monitor is just a small part of the hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste that flood the West African country and other developing nations each year.

When old technologies from Western nations, like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, are “recycled,” they are increasingly finding their way to places like the Ghanaian urban fringe of Agbogbloshie, which Frontline reports has become one of the world’s largest digital dumping grounds.

Watch the first half of the documentary below, where you’ll find the district computer in at roughly 3:40. Find the second portion here.

SCHOOL DISTRICT POLICY

What hasn’t yet been made clear is how a Philadelphia school district computer made it there, and whether it’s an isolated piece or suggestive of the hundreds of pounds of old technologies that the district is forced to discard annually.

Since 2006, the district’s Educational Technology Office has maintained a “green” policy for the disposal of computers and technology equipment, the statement says.

Schools and offices are asked to identify obsolete equipment, file asset removal paperwork and contact the district’s technology help desk. The help desk, in turn, contacts Clifton, N.J.-based computer recycling vendor Regentech, which is contracted to pick up the equipment — at no charge to the district. They then can refurbish, redistribute and resell any equipment as they see fit, as long as they meet U.S. Department of Environmental Protection standards, which the PBS documentary characterize as lax.

A Regentech spokesman did not return repeated calls for comment.

“This process has worked very well, and we are pleased with the performance of Regentech, Inc. Computer Recycling,” the district statement continued.

OTHERS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS

Like the district, most other large education institutions in the city do not ultimately handle the final destination of their recycled technologies.

“We rely on the third party vendors to do the responsible thing,” says Mark Aseltine, the executive director of the Technology Support Services at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we had any indication that they were not, we would stop using them right away.”

Penn offers tutorials on wiping memory clean and disposal options, but in the end, their junk gets carted away by an independent company, which is ultimately part of an industry that the PBS documentary suggests is “shadowy” and under legislated.

Yet, even those who are particularly active in the removal of unwanted technologies often use these outside contractors.

A program initiated at Temple University won the praise of a small feature in the June issue of University Business. The university has its own department to handle obsolete equipment, which is then stripped, updated, reused or otherwise redistributed. Putting some 1,800 old computers back into service is estimated to have saved the school nearly $1 million in the program’s six years of operation, but still models are eventually in need of recycling.

That’s the part of the tale that the PBS documentary suggests gets hairy, despite some federal intervention.

“There are alternatives to dumping old technology on the first person who will take it, and we are one of them,” says Steven Feldman the hardware manager of Fairmount-based Nonprofit Technology Resources, which boasts it is the largest computer refurbishment operation in Philadelphia.

Limiting the e-waste output can happen locally, too, Feldman says of NTR, which refurbishes and redistributes much of the hardware it receives at low or no cost to low-income Philadelphians. The school district has donated computers to NTR in the past, Feldman says.

While the nonprofit also uses an outside company to recycle some of the most outdated equipment it receives, Feldman says, “we remain vigilant, take tours of their facilities and methods.”

He declined to speculate on why the district would primarily use a vendor from outside the region for a no-cost solution. Regentech, like NTR and the third-party recycling companies used by Temple and Penn, is certified by the EPA.

The certification requires Regentech to maintain EPA disposal manifests for all equipment that is removed from the district. Those manifests were not yet obtained by Technically Philly, however, according to EPA documentation, Regentech (EPA ID # NJD 048351043, for those interested in further researc) has no significant violations alleged against them. They are also compliant with EPA inspection guidelines.

The details of the district’s announced investigation were not immediately available. Technically Philly will continue its coverage. As always, contact us with any insight or leads.

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Below watch a short report from Good magazine on e-waste

[Full disclosure: The author of this story is a graduate of Temple University]

Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

A compter labeled "School District of Philadelphia" pollutes a Ghanaian city. This screenshot is taken roughly three minutes and 55 seconds into a PBS Frontline video report.

Computer waste from the School District of Philadelphia is polluting the urban fringes of Ghana.

But then, the computer, depicted above and tagged for having come from the district as seen in an explosive PBS Frontline report on e-waste, is just a small part of the hundreds of millions of tons that flood the West African country.

The rapid transfer of technology has developed a shady, poorly regulated electronic waste recycling industry, Frontline reports, sending computer goods to developing nations, often with easy port access. When old technologies from Western nations, like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, are “recycled,” they increasingly are finding their way to places like Ghana’s Agbogbloshie, which Frontline reports has become one of the world’s largest digital dumping grounds.

Often, the report suggests, sensitive information remains on hard drives, which is a particular issue when the materials find their way to Ghana, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as one of the top sources of cyber crime in the world.

The report sent reporters undercover to a West Coast e-waste facility where they were assured their materials would be disposed of safely and locally. In their research, they found, instead, their recycled technologies ended up in a pile in a Hong Kong port.

The report suggests that companies label the e-waste they transport as donated materials, evading additional costs and oversight. As little as 50 percent of those shipments are able to be sold, a Ghanaian e-waste dealer interviewed by Frontline said, likely lessening any impact outdated Western technologies may have in lessening the digital divide.

The rest piles up, where, in the Ghanaian example, children burn the plastics to salvage and sell the copper and other metals. Until then, waste, like Philadelphia school district computers clog the waterways and lives of those in developing nations.