An old printer sat on a loading dock, waiting its turn into a shredder.
Inside its plastic shell, a small circuit board no one had asked for was already calling home.
It was one of hundreds of old machines handed to American recyclers and charities with a tiny tracker hidden inside.
Most stayed in the country, bound for domestic processors.
A smaller group did something nobody had promised they would do.
What made dozens of supposedly recycled machines cross oceans instead?
Why a donated monitor can end up on a container ship
A used monitor is, to the company paying to get rid of it, a liability that needs to disappear. Once it is handed to a hauler, that machine can pass through several sets of hands, each one buying pallets cheap and selling them on without ever opening a box.
So the cheapest path often wins. Breaking a monitor apart safely in the United States costs real labor and real disposal fees, while a buyer overseas will pay for the same scrap and do the dismantling by hand for a fraction of the price.
That price gap is the explanation the watchdog group behind this work points to, and its later trade-data research argues that export paperwork rarely gives the game away, because loads headed abroad are often declared simply as “scrap metal.” A bill of sale for scrap electronics can look much the same whether the metal ends up at a licensed US shredder or in a yard a continent away.
A printer’s real itinerary, told by a blinking dot
Each hidden tracker kept pinging a server with nothing but a location and a timestamp. Plotted on a map, those pings turned a vague promise about responsible recycling into a line that could be followed.
Then the pattern emerged. Devices crossed the Pacific and went quiet near ports, only to start transmitting again from industrial districts thousands of miles from where they had been dropped off for recycling.
Most of those overseas signals converged on one place. A semi-rural part of Hong Kong known as the New Territories, an old farming district along the border with mainland China, collected more of the tracked machines than any other destination abroad.
What investigators found when they followed the dots in person
The Basel Action Network, a Seattle watchdog, placed 205 GPS trackers inside old printers and LCD and CRT monitors, delivered them to US charities, retailers and recyclers beginning in 2014, and published the results in 2016. Sixty-nine of those devices crossed a national border. The exported machines turned up in Hong Kong (37), mainland China (11), Taiwan (5) and Pakistan (4), with the remainder scattered across Mexico, Thailand, Canada and single devices in several other countries.
The group reported that 96 percent of those exports were likely illegal under international or US law, and that 40 percent of the 152 trackers delivered directly to recyclers went offshore. Investigators then travelled to 48 separate sites in the New Territories and found electronics being smashed and pried apart by hand in open yards.
Jim Puckett, who founded the group, put it bluntly, saying “the American public continues to be scammed by unethical companies greenwashing themselves as recyclers.” Not every finding went uncontested: a Vermont recycler whose facility one tracked printer passed through stated publicly in the trade press that it had exported no device to any Hong Kong recycler, and that the printer had been sent to a certified recycler in the Chicago area.
The same pattern keeps showing up somewhere new
This was never a one time result. The same group hid GPS devices in 35 LCD monitors and printers and left them at recycling locations in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney in February 2025, and within a year three trackers surfaced on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, three at a cluster of factories in the Philippines and one at a large facility on Batam Island in Indonesia.
That repetition matters, because it suggests the gap is structural rather than a single bad actor. A diaper recycling plant near Treviso shows the opposite can work when a material has a clear buyer close to home, something America’s loose electronics does not reliably have.
Even so, most machines handed over in the US never left the country, according to the group’s own tally, which is a detail easy to lose in a story about the ones that did.
What is actually changing, and what still is not
A handful of states have started treating this as policy rather than scandal. Maine adopted the country’s first producer responsibility law for televisions and computer monitors in 2004, putting the cost of end of life handling on manufacturers, and this April it became the first state to extend that approach to vapes and e-cigarettes. Certification programs now press recyclers to document where material actually goes.
None of that closes the gap on its own. The same way glass missing from recycling bins each year shows a material can vanish from the system quietly, a printer can still travel further than its owner ever imagined.
The group has kept tracking devices since, and the fuller account of that first journey is still online in its own e-Trash Transparency Project files. A dot on a map, blinking from a scrapyard half a world away, remains some of the clearest evidence anyone has produced on where recycled electronics actually end up.
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