A HANDFUL of villages in southern China have been turned into horrendously
polluted reprocessing centres for the West’s electronics scrap, according to a
report released this week by five environmental organisations.
Jim Puckett, director of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network (BAN), the
lead group behind the report, describes the area as an “environmental wasteland”
where pollutant levels are hundreds to thousands of times higher than those
deemed safe in developed countries. “The ground is saturated in lead and acid
by-products,” he says. “Many of the poorer villagers still drink the surface
waters, which are highly contaminated.”
The villages are located on the outskirts of Guiyu, a town in Guongdong
province near Hong Kong. On a three-day tour in December 2001, Puckett and
colleagues from Greenpeace China observed trucks loaded with electronics scrap
arriving in their hundreds from the nearby port town of Nanhai.
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The local economy around Guiyu seems to be wholly dependent on recycling
imported scrap, says Puckett. This reprocessing takes place apparently without
any health or environmental controls, he adds.
The BAN report contains some of the most graphic descriptions yet obtained of
the results of exporting electronic waste to developing countries. For instance,
women and girls were seen heating circuit boards in molten lead solder to loosen
and remove computer chips for resale.
The lead is heated in open woks over hot coals, releasing toxic lead vapour
into the air. Once the chips have been separated, Puckett says, the lead is
simply poured onto the ground. Lead is among the most potent neurotoxins known,
and is particularly harmful to children and developing infants.
Experts say the rapid turnover of computers and the lack of recycling
facilities in the West contribute to the growing problem of e-waste exports to
developing nations. Preliminary calculations by Robin Ingenthron, president of
the consulting firm American Retrowork and former recycling director for the
state of Massachusetts, show that about 100 shipping containers of used
electronics—roughly 2250 tonnes—are exported weekly from the US
alone.
While imports of second-hand electronics do benefit developing countries,
Ingenthron says, these shipments are often accompanied by tonnes of unusable
scrap. “Unfortunately, a lot of this material winds up in countries where
environmental recycling and disposal standards are either non-existent or
ignored,” he says.