In China, unsafe recycling of computers increases

The technological garbage is poisoning the water and soil, and raising serious health concerns

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.

Dumping ground

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 labour 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 per cent 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."

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.

Frightening statistics

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.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that discarded electronics account for 70 per cent 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.

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.

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.

"It's a little bit dirty, but OK," said Wang Guangde, 27, a farmer from Sichuan, as he sat on the floor of a shed, taking apart printer drums.

"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."

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.
Mostly, they focus on the cash they are earning.

"It's dangerous, yes, but no money is more dangerous," said an 18-year-old woman named Lin, who came Guiyu from a neighbouring 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."