Forget cell phones, and look into the disposal of home computer components. Monitors, hard drives and keyboards that are broken or discarded get shipped to villages in China that exist only to render the plastic, metal, glass and chemicals that make up your average PC. Cancer rates in these villages are through the roof, and the byproducts from the burning have reached the water supply.
http://www.ban.org/ban_news/china_serves.htmlCHINA SERVES AS DUMP SITE FOR COMPUTERS
By Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post Foreign Service
GUIYU, China, 24 February 2003 -- Unsafe Recycling Practice Grows Despite Import Ban
This is the end of the road for the toxic detritus of the computer age.
In towns such as this one on China's southeastern coast, vast quantities of obsolete electronics shipped in from the United States, Europe and Japan are piled in mountains of waste. Even as entire communities, including children, earn their livelihoods by scavenging metals, glass and plastic from the dumps, the technological garbage is poisoning the water and soil and raising serious health concerns.
China's role as dumping ground for the world's unwanted gadgets is an outgrowth of efforts by wealthy countries to protect their own environments. Many governments are encouraging the recycling of computers to keep them out of landfills and prevent heavy metals from seeping into drinking water. But breaking computers down into reusable raw materials is labor intensive and expensive.
In the United States, where more than 40 million computers became obsolete in 2001 alone, according to a National Safety Council report, as much as 80 percent of the machines collected by recyclers are being disposed of for about one-tenth of the price through a far simpler means: They are being sold to Asian middlemen, put on ships and sent here.
Officially, China has its own ban on such imports, but the law is easily circumvented through payments to corrupt customs officials, according to industry sources.
The real costs are being borne by the people on the receiving end of the "e-waste." In towns along China's coast as well as in India and Pakistan, adults and children work for about $1.20 a day in unregulated and unsafe conditions. As rivers and soils absorb a mounting influx of carcinogens and other toxins, people are suffering high incidences of birth defects, infant mortality, tuberculosis and blood diseases, as well as particularly severe respiratory problems, according to recent reports by the state-controlled Guangdong Radio and the Beijing Youth newspaper.
"At the same time that we're preventing pollution in the United States, we're shifting the problem to somebody else," said Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental advocacy group. "It's being exported and doing harm."
High Toll on Humans, Environment
On a recent morning in Guiyu, in Guangdong province, hundreds of men squatted in concrete-block sheds, sifting through computers and printers and breaking them into scrap with their bare hands. Some inhaled black clouds of toner. A tractor carted a mass of wires to an alley, where women melted them in barrels to scavenge their copper before spilling the leftovers into the dead-black Lianjiang River.
In a low building tucked at the bottom of a hill, a middle-aged woman leaned over a sheet of steel placed atop a charcoal fire, melting down capacitors pried from computers to harvest tiny amounts of gold. Ten feet away, a girl no older than 11 bent over a table, sorting through more circuitry.
"Today there's no school," said the boss, Zheng Conggong, 27, when asked why the girl was there. "Vacation." It was 10 o'clock on a Monday morning, a regular school day everywhere else in China. When the boss stepped away, the girl timidly confirmed that she works here every day, all day. Her fingers were quick and nimble, clearly well-practiced.
Nearly every crevice of the town showed evidence of the trade, from the strips of plastic and shards of glass choking the river to the piles of motherboards, hard drives and keyboards in front of nearly every home. The landscape was poisonous. Glass from monitors contains lead, which afflicts the nervous system and harms children's brains. Batteries and switches contain mercury, which damages organs and fetuses. Motherboards contain beryllium, the inhalation of which can cause cancer.
Trucks bring in drinking water from more than 10 miles away because the local supply is not potable. Near a riverbank that has been used to break down and burn circuit boards, a water sample revealed levels of lead 190 times as high as the drinking water standard set by the World Health Organization, according to a report released last year by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and another U.S.-based environmental group, the Basel Action Network.
The environmental groups had their samples analyzed by the Hong Kong Standards and Testing Centre Ltd., according to their report. A sediment sample found levels of lead and other heavy metals such as chromium and barium hundreds of times as high as U.S. and European environmental standards for risk. The water test confirmed an earlier sample taken by a reporter for a Chinese-language publication in Hong Kong, Eastweek Magazine, which found even higher lead levels.
The report by the two environmental groups, "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia," accused computer manufacturers of failing to assume responsibility for the pollution they cause by instituting their own recycling programs. It also criticized the United States for declining to ratify the Basel Convention, an international agreement signed by every other developed country that aims to limit the export of hazardous waste. As a result, recyclers in the United States are not in violation of domestic laws when they ship computer waste to poor countries in Asia.
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