For Americans who are upgrading their televisions in time for the digital conversion on February 17, getting rid of the old analog clunker in the basement may be an afterthought. Not so for Barbara Kyle, who cringes at the thought of millions of old discarded television sets making their way to the landfill or bumping down a conveyor belt to be recycled—their parts most likely sent overseas to be sold or incinerated.

Government officials are “ushering in the biggest e-waste tsunami in history,” says Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. This is the biggest planned obsolescence effort in the history of the U.S. government, she says, but officials have engaged in no national dialogue about where all the old TV sets ought to go.

“That’s just an incredible oversight, especially considering they’re pushing a huge amount of toxins into the trash,” says Kyle.

The main toxin she’s referring to is decabromodiphenyl ether, or Deca-BDE, a brominated fire retardant used in most American televisions that has been banned across the European Union because of widespread health concerns. It’s added to plastic television casings during the manufacturing process and can’t be removed or recycled.

The chemical, which first entered the waste stream in the 1960s and ’70s, has a been detected in high concentrations in children, human breast milk, house dust, sewage sludge, as well as in fish and wildlife around the world. It’s been found to cause behavioral problems when introduced to rats and mice, along with tumors in the liver and thyroid. The Environmental Protection Agency points to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” for Deca-BDE but does not consider it dangerous enough to warrant any restrictions under the Toxic Substances Control Act. The agency has given the American Chemical Association until 2010 to do its own tests on the compound’s environmental fate.

Those who know it best describe Deca-BDE as the terminator chemical—no matter where it’s dumped, it manages to morph into another, more dangerous form. Left to degrade in a landfill, it breaks down into Penta- and Octa-BDE, more hazardous flame retardant chemicals that were phased out by chemical makers in 2004 after they were banned in Europe and several U.S. states. When incinerated, Deca-BDE releases dioxins and furans.

“These are really toxic chemicals and in their brominated form, they go into the atmosphere and last hundreds of years,” says Arlene Blum, an expert on flame retardants and visiting lecturer at U.C.-Berkeley.

Numbers vary on how many television sets are being dumped to make way for the digital conversion, but digital televisions were among the highest-selling holiday gifts last year. By the end of 2008, the Consumer Electronics Association estimates that more than 100 million DTV sets were shipped to U.S. households, while 112 million analog televisions were removed in 2007 and 2008 alone. And while recycling rates have increased for computers and cell phones, only 20 percent of Americans say they are recycling their television sets. But what happens to the Deca-BDE post-recycling is anybody’s guess.

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It’s been forty-one years since a well-meaning sales executive pulled Dustin Hoffman’s character aside to utter that immortal line about plastics in The Graduate. Benjamin may not have taken his advice, but he was right—plastics were the future, especially when it came to televisions. While computers have started eliminating plastics from their design—two MacBook models last year featured a metal skin—televisions have been slower to evolve. A typical digital television uses nearly twenty pounds of plastic when all the components are accounted for.

That’s a lot of plastic—and these days, nobody seems to want it. When a television is recycled, the plastic casing is bailed and sent to a processor to be taken apart and resold to the highest bidder. In the present marketplace, however, plastics are a cheap commodity. Because the export of plastics is not governed by any international law, some recyclers simply send it to other countries, where it gets burned. Even certified responsible recyclers aren’t required to verify what happens to plastics they send to a processor. Other television components, by contrast, like lead glass and mercury, are carefully track because they are considered hazardous components.

“There’s battery people, there’s glass people, there’s smelters. I don’t think there’s as much focus on the plastics,” says Gina Chiarella, chief operating officer with We Recycle!, a leading responsible electronics recycler serving New York and Connecticut. “Once it becomes a commodity, we’re not tracking where the processor is selling them,” she added. “We want to know that they’re not dumping it in a river somewhere.”

Selling the plastic back to an electronics manufacturer would seem like a logical step, but the irony is that companies such as Sony and Samsung will no longer accept recycled plastic laced with Deca-BDE in light of the recent ban in Europe.

“What’s the high road? There is none,” says Kyle. “That’s the sad thing. Once you have plastic laced with brominated flame retardants your options are you either downcycle it into something else, or you trash it.”

The flame retardant issue has made recycling plastics so difficult that only a few companies have emerged with the skills to do it. The world’s largest plastics reprocessor, MBA Polymers, based in Richmond, California, has found a way to separate out plastics containing Deca-BDE through testing, shredding, and re-testing. The company has manufacturing plants in Austria and China that take cell phones, computers, televisions, and even car parts and convert them into post-consumer plastic beads smaller than the size of a BB gun pellet.

Responsible recycling is expensive, which is why MBA Polymers is almost alone it its field. “We’re the biggest and we’re pretty tiny. We’ve only been doing it on a worldwide commercial scale for a few years,” said company founder and CEO Mike Biddle.

While Biddle’s company meets EU standards for maximum bromine content in new products, he cannot say the same for some of his shadier competitors. “There’s probably a few small players who will use anything they can find, cheaply,” he acknowledges. He suggests there’s nothing to stop them from turning it into other products, like plastic plates or children’s toys bound for the United States.

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The European ban has turned Deca-BDE into bad business. All leading TV manufacturers say they’ve already stopped using it. These same companies, including Sony, Samsung, Sharp, and Philips, also have a stated goal of eliminating all brominated flame retardants from their products by 2012 or sooner.

The problem is, no one knows what they’re replacing it with, says Alexandra McPherson, project director of Clean Production Action, a group that works with electronics and car companies on adopting “green” chemicals and products that are better for the environment. Some known alternatives to Deca-BDE contain ingredients environmentalists have already waged battles against, such as Bisphenol-A (which Canada plans to ban in plastic baby bottles) and Tris (2, 3,-dibromopropyl) phosphate, or chlorinated Tris, which was banned in children’s sleepwear in 1977.

“TV manufacturers have been much slower to embrace environmental designs at the front end,” says McPherson.

If Deca-BDE were truly no longer in use, that would be news to Biddle. His technicians still find the chemical in more televisions than any other type of flame retardant. And then there’s the cheaper, off-brand televisions sold at discount department stores. They’re not pursuing a global sales strategy and have little incentive to change, points out McPherson. “There’s a big percentage of TV manufactures we don’t even have names for, and a lot of times they’re sold to a Wal-Mart. Who are those other guys? That’s a big challenge for us.”

Plastics aside, Kyle says responsibly recycling an old television is still the best way to keep the greatest number of toxins out of the landfill. Otherwise, it may be best to store the old relic in a dark basement corner until somebody figures out what to do with the chemicals that threaten to outlive us all. “It seems strange for an environmental group that promotes recycling to suggest holding on to it,” she says with a laugh, “but at this point it may be the best thing.”

Julia Scott is an environmental reporter based in San Francisco. She writes about water, chemicals, food production and energy issues for a variety of publications.