Computers and old televisions that contain hazardous substances are still being exported out of Europe even though a ban is in place to stop this from occurring given the fact that it poisons workers in Asia and Africa.
In Rotterdam there is a large collection of old televisions packed into a shipping container that will be impounded and then sent back to the Germany instead of to the Ivory Coast where they were headed.
This is just one line of the new effort to stop electrical and electronic equipment fro, getting discarded in large quantities in the developing world.
Rotterdam is the busiest port in Europe that serves as a regional shipping hub with more than nine million containers passing through the area every year.
A third of those goods originate from the Netherlands alone with the rest coming from the other 26 members of the EU states including southern Europe and the UK.
In order to pick out which shipping containers may contain hazardous goods, customs officials select shipping by using risk profiling using a list of potential indicators of electronic waste such as the items destination and its sender.
Although the Dutch have been the leaders when it comes to stopping e-waste exports since it was banned in the middle of the nineties, still only about three percent of all containers are checked which means that about one shipment is caught every week allowing an unknown amount of other containers to possibly pass through.
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