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TechnoratiE-Wasting Away in China
The highway of poisoned products that runs from China to the United States is not a one-way street. America ships China up to 80 percent of its electronic waste -- discarded computers, cell phones, TVs, etc. Last year alone, the United States exported enough e-waste to cover a football and rise a mile into the sky.So while the media ride their new lead-painted hobbyhorse-- the danger of Chinese wares -- spare a thought for Chinese workers dying to dispose of millions of tons of our toxic crap.
Most of the junk ends up in the small port city of Guiyu, a one-industry town four hours from Hong Kong that reeks of acid fumes and burning plastic. Its narrow streets are lined with 5,500 small-scale scavenger enterprises euphemistically called "recyclers." They employ 80 percent of families or more than 30,000 people who recover copper, gold, and other valuable materials from 15 millions of tons of e-waste.
Unmasked and ungloved, Guiyu's workers dip motherboards into acid baths, shred and grind plastic casings from monitors, and grill components over open coal fires. They expose themselves and their community to brain-damaging, lung-burning, carcinogenic, birth-defect-inducing toxins such as lead, mercury, cadmium and bromated flame retardants (the subject of last month's column), as well as to dioxin at levels up to 56 times World Health Organization standards. Some 82 percent of children under 6 around Guiyu have lead poisoning
While workers reap $1 to $3 a day and an early death, the "recycling" industry in both the United States and China harvests profits. U.S. exporters not only avoid the cost of environmentally sound disposal at home, but they also turn a profit from selling the waste abroad.
After disassembly, one ton of computer scrap yields more gold than 17 tons of gold ore, and circuit boards can be 40 times richer in copper than cooper ore. In Guiyu alone, workers extract 5 tons of gold, 1 ton of silver and an estimated $150 million a year.
Many U.S. exporters pose as recyclers rather than dumpers. But a 2005 Government Accountability Office report found that "it is difficult to verify that exported used electronics are actually destined for reuse, or that they are ultimately managed responsibly once they leave U.S. shores."
This dumping of toxic waste by developed countries onto developing ones is illegal under the Basel Convention, a 1992 international treaty that was signed by every industrialized nation except the United States.
Unhindered by international law and unmonitored by Washington, U.S. brokers simply label e-waste "recyclable" and ship it somewhere with lax environmental laws, corrupt officials and desperately poor workers. China has all three. And a packing case with a $100 bill taped to it slips as easily as an eel through Guiyu's ports.
E-waste fills a neat niche in the U.S.-China trade. America's insatiable appetite for cheap Chinese goods has created a trade deficit that topped $233 billion last year. While e-waste does little to redress the financial disparity, it helps ensure that the container vessels carrying merchandise to Wal-Mart's shelves do not return empty to China.
In the 19th century, England faced a similarly massive deficit with China until a different kind of junk -- opium -- allowed it to complete the lucrative England-India-China trade triangle.
Britain, after destroying India's indigenous textile industry and impoverishing local weavers, flooded its colony with English textiles carried on English ships. The British East India Company fleet then traveled to China to buy tea, silk, and other commodities to sate Europe's appetites for "exotic" luxuries. But since there was little the Chinese wanted from either India or Europe, the ships traveled light and profitless on the India-China side of the triangle. That is, until England forced Indian peasants to grow opium and, in the process, precipitate mass starvation by diverting cultivable land.
The trade fleet then filled up with opium and pushed it in China through the port of Canton. Since opium was illegal in China, Britain started a war in 1839 to force Peking to accept the drug. By 1905 more than a quarter of China's male population was addicted.
Now it is Americans who are addicted to Chinese junk. And our own government policies and corporations are the ones stoking the jones. Slick marketing and consumer fetishism push Americans to buy the lightest, biggest, smallest, fastest, trendiest items. And even if you are not hooked on the latest, repairs or upgrades are impractical. So the half billion computers we trashed in the last decade have to go somewhere, and shipping them to China and other poor nations is a win-win solution for Chinese and U.S. industry.
As for the populations of both countries, we can feast on the irony that the same ships that carry toxic toys and food ingredients to Americans return bearing deadly e-waste for the Chinese.
Terry J. Allen can be reached by email at: tallen@igc.org
16 Comments so far
Show AllNot all of us, not me. I've never owned any or all of the above. I did buy one TV and I still use it.
Here is to very small foot prints. Be creative.
Ahhh, yes! I agree that e-recycling, and corporate and government e-rebates are exactly what we need. And we need more of them. However, a true progressive environmentalist would just get off the grid completely. One of my favorite magazines is Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/. This mag encourages getting off the grid, compositing, homesteading, and organic gardening. 1st world, industrial nations consume approximately 80% of the worlds resources, and putting a few "e-recycled" stickers on our computers doesn't change this equation much. We just like to pretend it does so we can impress all our friends, neighbors, and colleagues that we have a heightened sense of global-warming consciousness.
Gee, I wonder how many of us will be enjoying our cell/mobile phones, high-speed internet, computer word processing, and hi-def TVs over the next few years.
e-waste along with electromatic pollution is one of those little issuse the techno junkies prefer to ignore, as they progress to their techno paradise.
Each new scientific/techno revolution takes us further down the road to environmental ruin.
rrivera October 17th, 2007 11:32 am:
"...none of us here want to give up our cell/mobile phones in place of wall-mounted rotary phones, nor do we want to give up our high-speed dial up in place of a 56k modem. None us want to go back to the days of using typewriters in place of computer word processing..."
I think you are making an erroneous argument here. The choice is not between having these toys or not having them, it is between insisting that companies which manufacture these products do so in a way that internalizes the social, environmental and political costs related to said manufacture as part of their cost of doing business, or on the other hand to do business as we do now, in which we allow them to rape and pillage whole nations and the global environment for maximum profit, while paying little or nothing. (Whew! That was a long sentence!)
It IS possible to make and sell things and still be environmentally responsible, it's just not so damned profitable. Since we have latched onto (or been forced to accept, you choose) the idea of free market capitalism as the most efficient way to ensure we have what we need, we should insist that those who profit from it pay the incidental costs of production, not allow them to pretend there is no relationship and foist the problems and their associated costs off on the public at large.
People I know always cite European nations, particularly those with socialist systems, as examples of tax-and-spend government gone wild, supposedly milking working citizens of their hard-earned money to give to people who don't contribute their fair share. The part that never gets mentioned is that businesses over there also pay much higher taxes, partly because they are required by law to compensate for the costs to society of the production/ distribution of their product(s).
Contrast that with the American system which allows, even encourages, corporations to plunder resources and environment with impunity, while in many cases paying no taxes at all, all the while heaping the costs of cleaning up their messes on the backs of the working public, both here and abroad. People quite naturally complain about being required to pay the higher taxes necessary to make up the difference. But nothing is ever free. You either pay for it in a degraded quality of life, in the form of taxes to remediate the problems, or in higher product costs passed down by the manufacturer after THEY have paid the taxes to do so. The piper has to be paid, no matter what. But the latter option at least makes only the manufacturers and users of a technology responsible for paying the costs, not everybody, which is eminently more fair and responsible. It's REAL free enterprise, as opposed to what we have now, which is government-assisted corporate theft.
It is possible to have a much more eco friendly computer, that is recycled in a country with some standards. It is possible to run the computer with clean energy that comes from wind power not coal. The problem is that the cheapest method trumps the eco method almost every time as far as goods are concerned. When it comes to energy, the well established and corrupt fossil fuel industries win.
The irony of many of these posts is that they are precisely done via computers. We romanticize better, cleaner days, but yet none of us here want to give up our cell/mobile phones in place of wall-mounted rotary phones, nor do we want to give up our high-speed dial up in place of a 56k modem. None us want to go back to the days of using typewriters in place of computer word processing. Our beloved commondreams.org recently ran a fund raiser for a bigger, faster server for this site.
This is like all the progressives complaining about Bush winning in 04 and we all threatened to move abroad, but yet less than 1% actually did. This is like Gore now praised for his environmental work, but yet he and Clinton ushered in NAFTA. This is like 12-20 million illegal immigrants who bailed their own backward, corrupt, incompetent, ghetto country to live in the USA, but yet some us progressives only highlight the USA's flaws and then turn around to praise those foreign wrought governments as "rich, vibrant, multiculturalism."
And the irony marches on!
ezeflyer, you been reading too many Jack London political communist-lite books.
We are enticed to waste as a result of artificially low prices. The food industry drives the point home like none other. Prices of pork, for example have been kept low because the industry has consolidated into a small number of hideous operations with dangerous conditions and low wages for workers, and no regard for animal suffering.
Americans throw away mountains of food every day, because they can. Likewise, goods from China are dirt cheap, even though they have traveled thousands of miles. As a result, we buy more and more, as if consumerism is the path to happiness.
The insatiable quest not just for goods but for CHEAP goods (oil, etc) is behind many of the world's problems today.
Capitalism is a machine that produces a three-tiered world and national society.
It is organized as follows:
1. The Masters: This group controls access over material resources humans need to survive (i.e., The Head)
2. The Overseers: This group is delegated power in order to control the Masters' money, manpower, media, machines and military
(i.e., The Eye and the Arm)
3. The Slaves: This groups does the work and takes orders (i.e., The Hands)
The benefits of this power-pyramid (hierarchy of production) go up; the costs go down.
In order to control the slaves, The Overseers manage and apply a carrot/stick system to the slaves.
The one of the carrots used to keep the donkeys going are consumer toys?status objects (and the underlying ideology of consumerism)
The oligarchy has us racing to the bottom. We will be those Chinese.
Would you expect something similar to be happening in Taiwan? Merely a few miles from the center of bustling Taipei city? Incinerators are sadly the destination for a lot of recyclables (even after they have been specifically collected as recyclables) and the end result is dioxin-laden livestock in small farms surrounding the incinerator site, just a few miles away from the nation's capital. We do have an "EPA" here, though it is toothless and daft as a 1900s opium addict. Can anyone out there in Korea or Japan round out the state of affairs for the rest of East Asia?
There is no such thing as a "first-world country" or "third-world country." There are individual practices, but no nation as a whole deserves such a label. China (and Taiwan, and even the US) can posture as much as they want, but you still have to visit the sausage-making factory to get the truth, so to speak.
According to Marcuse's "An Essay on Liberation", consumerism is a means of social control. Monopoly Capitalism links the need to buy junk with sexual and aggressive instinctual drives. In this way, the people NEED to buy the junk and become defenders of the system.
Also, obscene, environmentally destructive waste is necessary in order to absorb the people's intellectual and moral predispositions to rebel, which would otherwise be set free by advanced productive forces generating greater material freedom from shortage, and more spare time. This way, they can keep us working and in line to work harder to consume more junk.
During the 1960s we criticized automobile manufacturers for promoting built-in obsolescence.
The manufacturers of electronic junk have elevated built-in obsolescence to levels never dreamed of in 1965.
Yes, excess consumerism and gross materialism is under minding environmental sustainability. But yet, we can't go back to the days of living in caves and riding a horse and buggy. Our beloved Commondreams.org is dependent on e-technology and e-commerce. Oh the irony! How do we strike a balance?
I returned to the Ugly-States-of-Amassing-More-More-More after spending a prolonged period overseas. Upon my return, I found that the renters of my house had put up THREE (count them!) satellite dishes on my house. Never having owned a TV in my forty-something years, I still wonder why there would be three dishes when there was never more than two people living in the house. Can someone explain that to me?
Anyway, there was also a spare one, along with the wires and black box and remote in the basement. When I called Dish Satellite about having them come to get their equipment, I was told, to my horror to "throw it away"!
I talked to a non-native English speaker residing in the Phillipines. I thought she might not have understood the question or I the answer. So, I called four other times - getting non-native English-speaking customer service reps in Inida, Singapore, Brazil, and China. They all said the same thing - throw it away.
I paid to have the stuff 'recycled' knowing that it was simply going to end up in some developing country's garbage dump. African countries take a lot of our WalMart unwanteds and they don't even have the ability to extract the salvagable stuff from it like China (though it's better for their health in the long run.)
I was so sad and so angry then. Reading this article makes me feel sad and angry all over again.
Human beings are a cancer - an experiment that failed long ago. Time to wipe us out, Earth Goddess. Protect yourself - human beings aren't worthy of your gifts.
This story seemed to have vanised from the CD start-up page. I got it back using the back button. What is that about.