The dead printer had one job left, and that job was snitching.

Hidden inside its casing sat a GPS tracker with its own SIM card, built to wake once every 24 hours, fix its position by satellite, report to a server and nod off again, as a project feature on urbanNext explained the design. After a recycler in Massachusetts accepted the printer, it drifted to a second recycler in Vermont, then to the Chicago area, then across the Pacific to an e-waste junkyard in Hong Kong’s New Territories, as TIME reported.

That printer was one of 205.

Between July 2014 and February 2016, the Basel Action Network, a Seattle watchdog known as BAN, slipped trackers into old printers and computer screens and dropped them at charities and recyclers around the United States. Its findings appeared in a 2016 report bluntly titled Scam Recycling, and the MIT Senseable City Lab, which pioneered the tracking method, turned the daily pings into an interactive map of all 205 routes.

Where the exported devices ended up

Sixty-nine trackers crossed a national border. Of the devices handed to American recyclers, 40 per cent finished up overseas, the report found. Hong Kong received 37, mainland China 11, Taiwan five, Pakistan four and Mexico three. Thailand and Canada took two apiece, and single devices surfaced in the United Arab Emirates, Togo, Kenya, Cambodia and the Dominican Republic.

Some covered close to 19,000 kilometres, per reporting by PBS NewsHour and EarthFix. BAN traced its Hong Kong arrivals to 48 separate sites in the New Territories, an old farming district along the mainland border.

Hong Kong used to be a waypoint. Much of this junk had long been trucked onwards into mainland China, with Guiyu, a cluster of villages in Guangdong province, the most notorious endpoint. BAN’s executive director, Jim Puckett, told PBS that a Chinese border crackdown called Green Fence made it far harder to get whole devices through, so the Hong Kong yards began doing the dismantling themselves.

Inside the New Territories scrapyards

High over the Pacific, Puckett spent his flight squinting at orange dots on a satellite image while the rest of the cabin slept. Next morning he followed those dots down rutted dirt roads until his receiver counted down the distance to a wall made of old shipping containers. Power drills whined on the far side, punctuated by breaking glass.

Inside, workers were stripping LCD televisions by hand. Snapped fluorescent tubes, the slim lamps that once lit those screens from behind, littered the ground, and each one gives off mercury vapour when broken. Nobody wore a mask. At another yard, printers were stacked about four and a half metres high over a lot roughly the size of a football field, and the people smashing them were dusted black with toner, a powder linked to breathing problems.

“People have the right to know where their stuff goes,” Puckett said.

Why shipping beat recycling

“They knew what they were doing was wrong.” So said a manager at Washington’s Department of Ecology in September 2016, as the agency fined Total Reclaim, a leading Seattle electronics recycler, US$444,000. BAN’s trackers had followed the company’s flat screens to Hong Kong, and the company’s own records showed the shipments went back seven years. PBS noted that Total Reclaim had been a founding member of e-Stewards, the green certification scheme BAN itself set up.

Money explains most of it. Commodity prices had slumped, with copper at half its 2011 price and, by the co-owner’s account, steel falling from US$300 to US$60 a ton. Printers are worth next to nothing, and flat screens are slow and expensive to take apart safely because of those mercury lamps. Filling a container with whole units and handing it to a broker simply pays better.

Law offered little resistance. No federal statute banned e-waste exports, and at the time America was the only industrialised nation that had not ratified the Basel Convention, a treaty meant to stop wealthy countries offloading hazardous waste onto poorer ones.

What one investigation can and cannot prove

How much American e-waste really leaves the country?

Estimates barely overlap. A 2013 survey of recyclers by the US International Trade Commission put exports for dismantling at 0.13 per cent of used electronics collected. UN figures cited by PBS ran from 10 to 40 per cent. Parts of the trade have long argued the problem is exaggerated.

Two hundred and five devices cannot settle that. This was one investigation, run by an advocacy group that also operates a certification scheme for the industry, and it focused on printers and monitors, just the sort of low-value, awkward kit that makes a good export candidate. The method was later written up in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Waste Management, pitching GPS tracking as a way to spot potentially non-compliant recyclers and trace hidden export routes, and discussing where the approach falls short.

What the trackers deliver is evidence precise enough to act on, down to a specific yard on a specific day.

That evidence keeps piling up. In February 2025, BAN hid trackers in 35 monitors and printers left at drop-off points in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, and within a year seven had surfaced in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, the ABC reported. Which operators, brokers or middlemen passed them along remained unclear, so the newest trackers have mapped where the devices went while the harder question, who sent them, is still hanging.