Laptop Battery 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.
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Thinkpad 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.
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Microsoft 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.
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Laptop Computers 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.
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Laptop Computer 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.
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Desktop Computer "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
Notebooks 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.
Lenovo 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.
Hard Drive "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.
Travelstar 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.
Gateway 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.
Laptop Parts 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.
Software 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.
Hard Drives New Entry Ports to Bypass Ban
Electronics China's ban on imports of many types of discarded computers and
electronics, which began last year, led the government to seize 22
shipping containers in the port of Wenzhou in September. But recent
visits to areas that have been at the center of the e-waste trade
revealed that it continues despite the ban, though more covertly.
In Guiyu, one truck after another wound down the muddy track
through town on a recent morning, bearing fresh loads of junked
electronics. One bore stickers showing it had come from Italy,
another from Korea and a third from Japan. In a concrete-block
building loaded with circuit boards, one load contained a sticker
from New Jersey.
Canon Many old computers were formerly shipped to Nanhai, a port
outside the city of Guangzhou. But shipping agents there said
customs officials have gotten strict since the ban. Much e-waste is
now routed through Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines on
container ships, according to those involved in the trade, then
trans-shipped to smaller ports in mainland China such as Shantou
and Jiangkou, where customs officials are willing to look the other
way in exchange for a share of the spoils.
Desktop Pc Mark Dallura, head of Chase Electronics Inc. of Philadelphia,
which buys discarded computers in the United States and then ships
them to China via Taiwanese middlemen based in Los Angeles, said he
has been in the trade for 15 years and has not been slowed by the
ban.
Desktop Computers "I sell it to [the Taiwanese] in Los Angeles and how they get it
there is not my concern," Dallura said. "They pay the customs
officials off. Everybody knows it. They show up with Mercedeses,
rolls of hundred-dollar bills. This is not small time. This is
big-time stuff. There's a lot of money going on in this."
Think Pad Dallura said his company gets many of its old computers from
recyclers scattered across the United States. They pick them up
from well-intentioned citizens and businesses that hand them off at
events organized by cities and counties aimed at keeping e-waste
out of landfills. He acts as a broker, consolidating container
shipments that he then hands off to the middlemen. Most weeks, he
ships at least one container bearing 45,000 pounds of such
waste.
Repair A container full of computer monitors brings him a fee of
$2,600, he said. During a recent week, he planned to ship four
containers. Two were bound for Hong Kong, the other two for Nanhai,
bearing mainframe computers not covered by China's ban.
Data Recovery "I could care less where they go," Dallura said. "My job is to
make money."
Cisco Taicang City, a collection of industrial warehouses an hour's
drive north of Shanghai in Jiangsu province, has long served as a
distribution center for e-waste, according to those engaged in the
trade. During a recent visit, stacks of keyboards and monitors
could be seen along the walls of warehouses that have historically
received them. Local motorcycle drivers said they continue to take
buyers from all over eastern China to 15 such warehouses, and
trucks arrive regularly with shipments from the port of
Shanghai.
Keyboard "The local government tolerates this stuff," said Ren Maohui,
one such driver. "The government would rather tax the trade than
put it out of business."
Monitor Ren said he recently took a buyer from Zhejiang province
interested in procuring circuit boards to a warehouse controlled by
a Taiwan-based firm, Suzhou Yuefa Nonferrous Metal Product Co. In a
brief interview, the company's general manager said he could not
remember when his last shipment of old computers was delivered. But
Ren recalled a different account supplied to the buyer: "They
didn't have enough, but they told him, 'Don't worry. We get foreign
shipments every month. We'll get more.' "
Desktop E-Waste Recyclers' Role to Grow
Infosys As the cycle of electronics obsolescence accelerates, the flow
of e-waste to China seems likely to increase. More computers, for
example, are being retired -- most of them in good working order,
but unable to handle the latest software advance, from digital
video-editing to graphics-intensive games.
Refurbished Laptops The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition estimates that from 1997 to
2007, as many as 500 million computers will have been discarded in
the United States. In addition, a shift to high-definition
televisions will probably lead to the disposal of more of the old
cathode-ray-tube variety, which contain lots of lead. And as newer
flat-panel monitors begin to be retired, the mercury they contain
will find its way into the waste stream as well.
Wipro The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that discarded
electronics account for 70 percent of heavy metals in U.S. garbage
dumps. Massachusetts and California have banned the disposal of old
computer monitors in landfills, and other states are considering
similar laws. Large businesses are already barred from sending
their old computers to landfills. The result is a growing role for
electronics recyclers.
Lap Top But as the EPA discovered in a survey in California, the cost of
actually dismantling and reusing the materials in a computer
monitor in the United States is about 10 times as high as the cost
of shipping it to China. That neatly explains why the streets of
Guiyu remain buried under mounds of old computers.
Refurbished At the same time, China's transition to a market economy has
sharply increased a gap in living standards between thriving
coastal regions and impoverished interior areas. That explains why
so many have come here from other places to try to harvest fortune
out of the electronics refuse from abroad.
Memory "It's a little bit dirty, but okay," said Wang Guangde, 27, a
farmer from Sichuan, as he sat on the floor of a shed, taking apart
printer drums.
Intel "We need this work," said his friend, a farmer from Guizhou
province. "If the government shuts it down here, it will just move
somewhere else and we'll move with it."
As400 The workers acknowledge the cuts on their fingers -- infections
that do not heal. Stubborn, hacking coughs testify to the poorly
ventilated places in which they breathe noxious fumes.
Averatec Mostly, they focus on the cash they are earning.
Hardware "It's dangerous, yes, but no money is more dangerous," said an
18-year-old woman named Lin, who came Guiyu from a neighboring
province for work, as two children pulled discarded computer mice
through the muddy street like toy ships. "No money means you'll die
of hunger."
Dual Xeon By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post - 2/24/2003
Topic: Toxics
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