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HANOI: Millions of tons of discarded electronics from the United States are being shipped overseas, much of it to developing countries in Southeast Asia unprepared to safely handle hazardous waste, according to a new report released Wednesday by an environmental watchdog.
The Seattle-based Basel Action Network, or BAN, said a two-year investigation found at least 10 US companies exporting used electronics to Asia and the Middle East, in what it says is a “hidden tsunami” of electronic waste.
“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,” the report said.
Growing e-waste
Electronic waste, or e-waste, includes discarded devices like phones and computers containing both valuable materials and toxic metals like lead, cadmium and mercury. As gadgets are replaced faster, global e-waste is growing five times quicker than it’s formally recycled.
The world produced a record 62 million metric tons in 2022. That’s expected to climb to 82 million by 2030, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union and its research arm, UNITAR.
Toxic chemicals
That American e-waste adds to the burden for Asia, which already produces nearly half the world’s total. Much of it is dumped in landfills, leaching toxic chemicals into the environment. Some ends up in informal scrapyards, where workers burn or dismantle devices by hand, often without protection, releasing toxic fumes and scrap.
About 2,000 containers — roughly 33,000 metric tons (36,376 US tons) — of used electronics leave US ports every month, according to the report. It said the companies behind the shipments, described as “e-waste brokers,” typically don’t recycle the waste themselves but send it to companies in developing countries.
Response to the report
The companies identified in the report include Attan Recycling, Corporate eWaste Solutions or CEWS, Creative Metals Group, EDM, First America Metal Corp., GEM Iron and Metal Inc., Greenland Resource, IQA Metals, PPM Recycling and Semsotai.
Six of the companies didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
Semsotai told The Associated Press that it doesn’t export scrap, only working components for reuse. It accused BAN of bias.
PPM Recycling told The Associated Press that its warehouses in California and Texas ship only aluminum and other non-iron metals to Malaysia. It said BAN had exaggerated shipment volumes, adding that it used accurate trade codes and followed US and international rules.
Greenland Resource told The Associated Press it took the allegations seriously and was reviewing the matter internally and couldn’t comment further without seeing the report.
CEWS said it follows strict environmental standards, but some aspects of where and how recycled materials are handled are industrial secrets.
Value of more than $1 billion
The report estimated that between January 2023 and February 2025, the 10 companies exported more than 10,000 containers of potential e-waste valued at over $1 billion, the report said. Industrywide, such trade could top $200 million a month.
Eight of the 10 identified companies hold R2V3 certifications — an industry standard meant to ensure electronics are recycled safely and responsibly, raising questions about the value of such a certification, the report said.
Several companies operate out of California, despite the state’s strict e-waste laws requiring full reporting and proper downstream handling of electronic and universal waste.
International treaty
Many e-waste containers go to countries that have banned such imports under the Basel Convention, which is an international treaty that bars hazardous waste trade from non-signatories like the US, the only industrialized nation yet to ratify it.
The nonprofit said its review of government and private trade records from ships and customs officials showed shipments were often declared under trade codes that did not match those for electronic waste, such as “commodity materials” like raw metals or other recyclable goods to evade detection. Such classifications were “highly unlikely” given how the companies publicly describe their operations, the report said.
Landfills and pollution
Tony R. Walker, who studies global waste trade at the Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies in Halifax in Canada, said he wasn’t surprised that e-waste continues to evade regulation. While some devices can be legally traded if functional, most such exports to developing nations are broken or obsolete and mislabeled, bound for landfills that pollute the environment and have little market value, he said.
He pointed to Malaysia — a Basel Convention signatory identified in the report as the primary destination for US e-waste — saying the country would be overwhelmed by that volume, in addition to waste from other wealthy nations.
“It simply means the country is being overwhelmed with what is essentially pollution transfer from other nations,” he said.
‘Makkah of junk’
The report estimates that US e-waste shipments may have made up about 6 percent of all US exports to the country from 2023 to 2025. After China banned imports of foreign waste in 2017, many Chinese businesses shifted their operations to Southeast Asia, using family and business ties to secure permits.
“Malaysia suddenly became this mecca of junk,” said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network.
Containers were also sent to Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and the UAE, despite bans under the Basel Convention and national laws, the report added.
In countries receiving this US e-waste, “undocumented workers desperate for jobs” toil in makeshift facilities, inhaling toxic fumes as they strip wires, melt plastics and dismantle devices without protection, the report said.
Efforts to control illegal imports
Authorities in Thailand and Malaysia have stepped up efforts to curb illegal imports of US e-waste.
In May, Thai authorities seized 238 tons of US e-waste at Bangkok’s port seized 238 tons of US scrap at Bangkok’s port while Malaysian authorities confiscated e-waste worth $118 million in nationwide raids in June.
Most of the facilities in Malaysia were illegal and lacked environmental safeguards, said SiPeng Wong, of Malaysia’s Center to Combat Corruption & Cronyism.
Exporting e-waste from rich nations to developing nations strains local facilities, overwhelms efforts to manage domestic waste and is a form of “waste colonialism,” she said.

HAARLEM: Palwasha Hamzad wants the Dutch election to be not about migration, but about tackling the chronic housing shortages in the Netherlands.
For Daniëlle Vergauwen, it’s about putting “our own people” first.
Their opposing views sum up two of the key issues in campaigning for the Oct. 29 election for all 150 seats in the Dutch parliament’s legislative House of Representatives. They also echo debates about migration across Europe as right-wing politics gain support.
Wilders’ stunning victory
Far-right, anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders ‘ Party for Freedom, known by its Dutch acronym PVV, swept to a shock victory in 2023 on a pledge to drastically rein in migration. He triggered the downfall of the subsequent four-party coalition government in June by withdrawing his lawmakers from the Cabinet in a dispute over implementing his crackdown.
This time around, Wilders’ campaign pledge is a “total halt” to asylum-seekers. An analysis of parties’ election manifestos by the Dutch Order of Lawyers said that such a policy would be a breach of international treaties.
“We have too many foreigners, too many asylum-seekers, too much Islam and far too many asylum-seeker centers,” Wilders’ manifesto says. What he casts as the ”open-borders policy” of his political rivals “is totally destroying our country.”
Wilders’ party leads polls as the voting day nears, but even if he manages to win again, he is unlikely to manage to piece together a coalition, because many other mainstream parties have ruled out working with him. Other more mainstream parties also have included moves to cut migration in their manifestos as the issue cuts across political fault lines.
Violent protests against new asylum-seeker centers have broken out in recent months in towns and villages across the Netherlands, with protesters lighting flares and sometimes waving a tricolor flag that was adopted by Dutch Nazi sympathizers around World War II. Wilders says he’s opposed to violence.
Afghan-born educator
Hamzad is a beneficiary of long-standing Dutch hospitality to asylum-seekers that has taken a hit in recent years. She fled the Afghan capital, Kabul, as a child and eventually settled in this historic city close to Amsterdam. In near fluent Dutch, she identifies herself now as a proud resident of Haarlem, where she works in elementary education and is a municipal representative for the Green Left, the party that has joined forces with the Labour Party to present a united center-left bloc at the election.
Hamzad argues that people being forced to sleep in cars, and families having to wait for years for social housing are far more pressing issues than reining in migration. She says the housing crisis isn’t caused by “new Netherlanders,” but instead by years of right-leaning ruling coalitions.
“We see that the free market has had too much influence, and social provisions have been more and more eroded,” she said.
Wilders’ heartland
Vergauwen was born and raised in the rural village of Sint Willebrord, where nearly three out of every four votes went to Wilders’ party at the 2023 election.
“We’re more for our own people,” she said outside the clothing store she owns and runs in Sint Willebrord’s main street. “Of course, we grant them more than we grant the foreigners who come in.”
Wilders conflates the issues of housing shortages that sees people wait for years for a subsidized apartment or priced out of overheated housing markets. He argues that waiting lists are so long because refugees get preferential treatment.
Vergauwen agrees.
“You increasingly see people coming to the Netherlands because things are getting worse in their own country,” she said. “But then you’ll end up with your own children no longer being able to have a home. And I would find that very sad.”
The official Dutch government statistics office says that overall migration last year was down by 19,000 from the previous year to 316,000 in this nation of 18 million, including people whose asylum applications were accepted. Around 40 percent came from Europe and almost half from the rest of the world. About one in 10 were Dutch nationals returning from overseas.
The government says that municipalities have other options for housing refugees, not just social accommodation. The Dutch refugee council rejects Wilders’ argument that people granted a protection visa to live in the Netherlands are the cause of the housing crisis, saying there are simply not enough houses being built.
‘Politicizing immigration’
Léonie de Jonge, Professor of Far-Right Extremism at the University of Tübingen in Germany, says Wilders “has been super successful in politicizing immigration as a cultural threat to the homogeneity of the Netherlands.”
Keeping the issue high on the political agenda “really helps to explain why the PVV is so successful,” she added.
De Jonge said that while support for Wilders remains high, voters could still punish him at the ballot box for failing to deliver on his promises after the 2023 election.
Hamzad says she is optimistic the election will bring a change of political direction and will be remaining in her adopted homeland regardless of the outcome.
“It’s my life and my future,” she said. “My commitment is here in the Netherlands.”