American firms are shuffling off discarded electronics to developing countries, environmental watchdog BAN has alleged
Brokers are shipping millions of tons of scrapped electronics from the US overseas, largely to developing countries in Asia and the global South that are unprepared to safely handle the toxic waste, according to a report released on Wednesday.
According to the Seattle-based watchdog Basel Action Network (BAN), ten large US firms have been shipping significant volumes of e-waste to countries that have banned its import. BAN said the business could total more than $200 million each month. Industry-wide, the trade could exceed $200 million per month, BAN estimated.
Between January 2023 and February 2025, such shipments may have amounted to 6% of all US trade with Malaysia, the primary recipient of this flow of hazardous waste, it said.
“This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste, is taking place... padding already lucrative profit margins of the electronics recycling sector while allowing a major portion of the American public’s and corporate IT equipment to be surreptitiously exported to and processed under harmful conditions in Southeast Asia,” it said.
BAN alleged that the brokers and “largely unregulated intermediaries” facilitated the practice, which “may contravene certification requirements, legal frameworks, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles.”
Many of these brokers, which operate in industrial zones east of Los Angeles and market themselves as “responsible recyclers,” in fact ship e-waste to informal junkyards overseas while routinely misclassifying the cargo as raw materials or working electronics, according to BAN.
At such facilities, the hazardous waste is often processed through open burning, acid leaching, and other dangerous methods by undocumented laborers without adequate protection, the watchdog said. Subsequent rogue dumping of the byproducts also poses long-term risks to the environment and local communities, it added.
E-waste has been on the rise worldwide, hitting a record of 62 million metric tons in 2022, with less than a quarter documented as being properly recycled, according to UN data. By 2030, the figure is expected to hit 82 million metric tons.
