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Today's Top News
China's e-Waste Capital Chokes on old Computers
GUIYU, China - Guiyu is a modern day gold rush town. But instead of panning for gold in babbling streams, workers shift through piles of broken old computer parts in acrid smelling shacks, smelting down parts with crude equipment to extract valuable metals like gold and copper.
Every year, millions of unwanted computers, keyboards, television sets and cell phones are smuggled into China by sea. Much ends up in Guiyu, a rough town on the southern Chinese coast, not far from the former British colony of Hong Kong.
There is little regard for safety -- no masks, little ventilation and few signs of government officials enforcing what safety rules do exist in China.
The lucky few wear rough but thin gloves. They are too scared of losing their jobs, or being beaten up, to dare to talk to visiting foreign reporters.
The state-run newspaper the People's Daily said last year that Guiyu's more than 5,500 e-waste businesses employed over 30,000 people.
It estimated the business to be worth 1 billion yuan ($130.9 million) in Guiyu alone.
Yet many of the workers, who come from all parts of China, are paid as little as $3 a day.
"Workers never benefit from this," said Lai Yun from environmental group Greenpeace, poring over gruesome pictures of workers injured by exploding computer parts or burns from the furnaces.
"It's always the middlemen. They scoop the most money out of this business. Workers usually end up with nothing, but still they are willing to work this job that's damaging to their health," he told Reuters.
OUT WITH THE OLD
According to a 2005 U.N. report, up to 50 million metric tons of e-waste is generated annually, as people upgrade laptops and PCs and throw out old models.
The China Quality News estimates that about 72 percent of that e-waste ended up in China.
During the disposal process, workers, including women and sometimes children, are exposed to a toxic cocktail of chemicals. The many small businesses take few safety precautions to protect their workers.
State media estimated almost nine of out 10 of the people in Guiyu suffered from problems with their skin, nervous, respiratory or digestive systems.
After the useful metals are taken out, leftover parts are often dumped in landfills or rivers or simply burnt. Piles of old computers even block the traffic in some parts of Guiyu.
"People use the least investment, the most simple equipment, the shortest time possible to get the most profit out of this business," said Nie Yongfeng, an environment professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University.
"That's all they care about."
It is highly lucrative. The discarded waste is full of gold and copper.
Reporters and green activists are not welcome.
A car carrying Reuters journalists to Guiyu was stopped on the outskirts of town by stocky men traveling in a car with blacked out windows who threatened to beat up the driver.
Local businessmen fear critical reports, for if the government cracks down and the waste stops coming, the money will stop flowing too.
Nie said the local government did want to take control.
"The problem is that we can control the above board channels, but we cannot control what's been coming in through underground channels," he added.
"I think this is the situation in China and it's the same situation in Japan and the U.S. I can't say the government is doing nothing to take control, but it's almost impossible to regulate what happens underground," Nie said.
E-waste is not supposed to be exported without the consent of the importing country.
To bypass it, e-waste is labeled as "used PCs" or "mixed metals" according to Greenpeace, and smuggled in from Hong Kong.
According to Nie, the local government came up with a plan two years ago to remove the waste in Guiyu.
But the business was too lucrative to just vanish overnight, and little has changed except locals are now much more vigilant about outsiders.
© Reuters 2006.
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8 Comments so far
Show AllAh, externalities of production. When it comes to disposing of the crap they produce, every capitalist is a socialist. Simple solution: Require all manufacturers to repossess this junk at the end of its life cycle.
jamienewman,
"Require all manufacturers to repossess this junk at the end of its life cycle". All electronics are manufactured in Asia, so they are actually going back to the manufacturer :)
Yes jamienewman, you said it: "When it comes to disposing of the crap they produce, every capitalist is a socialist." You could have added that when it comes to building large-scale infrastructure (e.g. roads, utilities) to service their firms they are also socialists.
I don't want to dignify chameleon6's juvenile remark, but your simple solution won't work without a few added complications. As chameleon6 suggested, it is seldom clear exactly who the manufacturer is what with a physical location in Asia and 67% of the investment capital from North America, for example, not to mention the legal tangles of nation-states and transnational corporations.
One approach is to attach a "recycle ticket" to each item (it can be an RFID chip perhaps) which the manufacturer pays for up-front but the cost can be folded into the item at the time of sale. The cost of the ticket (or a percentage of it) can be redeemed by the buyer when recycling at an approved center.
Well, chameleon6's comment is probably accurate, but,
unless it is an actual Asian/Chinese-branded computer,
you can bet the money (purchase) is going to a
non-Asian company (which might even be true for the
A/C brands.)
The price should have a (substantial) recycling fee
built in. That fee should go into an escrow fund to
pay for the recycling of the equipment. It would be
nice to just be able to drop it off where it was
bought or somehow have it returned to the manufacturer
(at no further cost), but since one never knows who is
going to be in business this year or next, the escrow
could insure the proper handling of the equipment
(unless a crooked Bush crony takes care of it and
you know it won't be handled properly.)
If the recycling fee is high enough, then people
might not continue purchasing wastefully - yes,
perhaps people would just consider the fee to be
rolled over to the new equipment. (But still more
incentive to the manufacturers to do the recycling
so they can sell new stuff.)
Of course this produces other economic issues. If
the recycling fee is high enough to keep them from
being tossed, will it also be high enough to keep
used equipment from being donated to worthy purposes
thereby reducing access for such purposes or to be
acquired by the economically disadvantaged? Can't
win for losing - though bottom line, still probably
best to stop the pollution/health costs first.
Extend the lives of your devices for as long as possible. Do you really need to change cell phones every six months or computers every two years? Companies will continue to come out with new models every year to make you feel obsolete and inadequate when your old models are perfectly adequate for most tasks. You don't have to buy into their hype.
More thought needs to go into getting the gold, copper and other material out of electronics. These operations are the equivalent of a meth lab.
Drop off centers need to funnel waste to subsidized waste recycling centers that safely do the job right. Industry should either run these centers or pay the subsidy. They could be a non-profit organization.
Companies need to make more durable goods for this to work - there are many indicators of built-in obsolescence in the manufacture of cell phones. Moreover, our economy could have something to learn from the "slow life" theories and practice of Japan - without constant advertising for new devices and pressure to impress others with your conspicuous consumption, electronics would be bought to fit our need, rather than our fetish. Finally, computer manufacturers should have to use chemicals that are not harmful to the people dismantling the computers, whether they are recycled or not.
An analyst on the News Hour tonight said of the $1000
spent on a computer built in China, $100 of it stays
in China. The rest goes to outside companies.