Thread: Thai officials seize over 200 tons of illegally imported electronic waste from the US

Thai officials on Wednesday said they seized 238 tons of illegally imported electronic waste from the United States at the port of Bangkok, one of the biggest lots they've found this year.


The waste, which came in 10 large containers, was declared as mixed metal scrap but turned out to be circuit boards mixed in a huge pile of metal scrap, said Theeraj Athanavanich, director-general of the Customs Department.

The waste was found on Tuesday after the containers became the subject of a routine random inspection, officials said.


A U.N. report last year said electronic waste is piling up worldwide. Some 62 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2022 and that figure is on track to reach 82 million tons by 2030, the report said. It said only 22% of the waste was properly collected and recycled in 2022 and that quantity is expected to fall to 20% by the end of the decade due to higher consumption, limited repair options, shorter product life cycles, and inadequate management infrastructure.

Theeraj said Thai authorities are looking to press charges including falsely declaring imported goods, illegally importing electronic waste and planning to re-export the waste back to its country of origin.


“It’s important that we take action on this kind of goods,” he said. “There are environmental impacts that are dangerous to the people, especially communities around factories that might import these things for processing, then recycling.”

Electronic waste creates huge health hazards. Many components are laden with lead and mercury, cadmium and other toxins. Recyclers are after gold, silver, palladium and copper, mainly from printed circuit boards, but lax controls mean that facilities often burn plastics to release encased copper and use unsafe methods to extract precious metals.

Thailand passed a ban on the import of a range of electronic waste products in 2020. The Cabinet in February approved an expanded list of the banned waste.


Sunthron Kewsawang, deputy director-general of the Department of Industrial Works, said officials suspected at least two factories in Samut Sakhon province, which borders Bangkok, are involved in importing the waste.


In January, the Customs Department said it seized 256 tons of illegally imported electronic waste from Japan and Hong Kong at a port in eastern Thailand.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...us/ar-AA1ELrc1

Surely they know the company who exported this crap. Name and shame.

Originally Posted by misskit

A U.N. report last year said electronic waste is piling up worldwide.

Later this year, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10. My laptop is just fine, on Windows 10. At some point I, and probably millions of others, will be forced to scrap perfectly adequate hardware if we want to use Windows 11.

I wonder what tonnes and tonnes of crap China will be taking down to their Chinese factories on their Chinese trains, half of it will probably be glowing green.

They've got a road running from China to Singapore now too.

Maybe it won't need lights.

Originally Posted by Molle

You are not forced, you can do a simple registry hack and then run Win11 on the laptop. You are also not forced to run Win11, it is not that much better than Win10 and discontinued support means that you will not get any new updates and thereby also no new bugs.

Okay, maybe 'forced' is too strong. I can continue to run Win10 and being a fairly simple sort of user it is possible that my laptop will outlive me.

All will be fine until the day comes when I want to load new software or apps that look for TMP compliance. Then my choices will be limited.

The whole supposed point of Win11 is the TPM security advantage. Why would I want to run Win11 on a machine without TPM?

For some people out there, a 'simple registry hack' might be straightforward. I could switch to Linux. There are various workarounds suggested and I don't plan to mess with any of them.

I believe the real driver for MS is user identification, tying users to machines and scraping data. They can dress it up as security if they wish. Whatever the reasons, I don't appreciate my perfectly serviceable machine facing an early retirement and my main point is that many personal users will give up their machines and add to this mountain of electronic waste.