China's Computer Wasteland
Joffe-Walt, Benjamin
China's Computer Wasteland By Benjamin Joffe-Walt Photos by Alexia Webster "Shhh. Shhhhhhhhhh!" the driver in Guangdong province whispers to us. He stares at the photographer out of the corner of...
...The average CRT computer monitor contains four to eight pounds of lead, and the average LCD monitor contains four milligrams of mercury...
...But, given the volume of e-waste produced each year, domestic reuse and recycling is wishful thinking for the time being...
...When we stop, he won't even get out of the car...
...It also produces many of the 150 million computers that head out yearly on a peculiar round trip...
...Even if the work would kill me, I'd continue," says He Ti Guang, a wire cutter in an e-waste factory downtown...
...Circuit boards are used to hole up corrugated iron shacks housing migrants right next to heaps of junk along the river...
...Guiyu is a cyber desert...
...Workers say the average salary for sweatshop work is $3 to $4 per day for men, and about half that for women...
...brominated flame retardants in circuit boards and plastic casings...
...When asked, though, he doesn't know much about the dangers involved...
...There are many cases of lung problems, and the burning releases pollutants that cause diseases like silicosis, heart attacks, and pulmonary edema," says Dr...
...By my calculations, his street-side sweatshop is making upwards of $30,000 per month in profit...
...Gradually, they realized computer rubbish is better than other rubbish and started getting into e-waste...
...The most dangerous and hardest jobs they give to the migrant workers," says Jun...
...They burn along the river...
...You wash it and it turns yellow...
...Sound computer recycling programs are available...
...He is tight-lipped, redder in the face, unyielding...
...Though particularly pronounced in China, the e-waste of the Western world is being dumped all over Asia...
...In May of 2001, the European Union adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take financial responsibility for the recovery and recycling of e-waste and to phase out the use of hazardous materials...
...My family is poor, so I came here to earn money...
...Two member groups, the Basel Action Network and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, say in a report that 80 percent of e-waste collected in the United States is exported to Asia...
...Brand owners and manufacturers in the U.S...
...Today, more than 50 percent of U.S...
...At first, Guiyu seems like any other rural Chinese town-flooded rice fields, streets swamped with produce vendors, migrant workers carrying bamboo on mopeds...
...They don't use them...
...Computers are not built to be recycled, environmentalists say, and their dismantling is extremely dangerous, labor-intensive, and costly...
...The poor of the world," it adds, are forced to "bear a disproportionate share of the e-waste environmental burden...
...Studies estimate that 315 million to 600 million computers in the United States will be obsolete by 2006...
...A large town along the Lianjiang River in southeastern China, Guiyu is the secret epicenter of illegal e-waste (electronic waste) processing in China...
...The streams running through the migrants' riverside tenements are a blinding, shiny silver due to mercury and other toxins...
...The air is fierce, infected, as if the atmosphere itself had been viscously conquered by toxic paint, scorched bread, and burning plastic...
...It's impossible to wear a white shirt...
...Toxics Link, an Indian environmental group, claims that recycling a computer in India costs $2 on average, compared to $20 in the United States...
...His wife works in a plastics e-waste factory, melting old wires, computer monitors, TVs, and cellphones to be used for plastic chairs and thermoses...
...According to the Worldwatch Institute, workers breathe in all types of toxins: cadmium in chip resistors and semiconductors...
...The United States is using "hidden escape valves to export the crisis to developing countries of Asia," the report states...
...This current reality is the dirty little secret of the electronics industry...
...The groups in the campaign call on consumers to use their buying power to promote greater corporate responsibility, computer recycling, and a reduction in hazardous e-waste...
...beryllium on motherboards and connectors...
...They then sell these products to Western countries...
...He competes with eight other migrants, and he has a month-old baby...
...and lead, phosphor, barium, and hexavalent chromium in computer monitors...
...We head back to the river to thank Chang...
...China's e-waste crisis is a byproduct of its unequal development...
...The more developed areas won't do it," says Zhao Jun, who migrated to Guiyu twelve years ago as a teenager to work in e-waste...
...It sells for $1.50 a kilo, he says...
...This waste is too hot, and it burns...
...The migrant workers fear the local people will beat them if they talk about it to anyone...
...Farming computers is more profitable than growing rice...
...After a pilot project to recycle computer monitors, the U.S...
...Hai does not approve of this trade...
...Since my guide warned me that e-waste bosses want to keep all journalists out and would even kill me if they knew what I was doing, I pretend I'm interested in buying ten tons of bronze a month for a South African company...
...Local residents got rich scouring the trash and brought in migrants to start scouring it for them...
...The real crime," says Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, "is the unwillingness of countries like the United States and Japan to take responsibility for preventing the global dumping of their own toxic waste...
...He turns away from us, coughs a bit, and bikes home along the banks of the Lianjiang River...
...Inside are migrant workers, usually women, stripping wires, banging circuits, and disassembling broken motors...
...Chang stands shirtless atop scorched medical equipment, printing toner, and audio speakers...
...E-waste sweatshops often sit in secluded areas off the street...
...The locals who used to do the e-waste work are now wealthy e-waste bosses...
...Policymakers in the United States also understand the dynamics of dumping in Asia...
...It takes me two weeks to produce twenty tons of the stuff...
...I'm just trying to get some money," says Luo Yuan Chang, a newly arrived migrant from Hunan province who is burning old computers along the river...
...Most of it is coming from recycling programs in countries that are trying to prevent pollution of their own territory," says Lai Yun, a Chinese environmentalist...
...He stares at the photographer out of the corner of his eye...
...There is no smell more violent...
...But then you open the window...
...Life is better here because I can get more money...
...He is meandering on top of crumbled, smoking circuit boards, in a burning pile of e-waste...
...Chang must work late...
...Your tongue tastes like sugar, and your skin is itchy," she says, holding her finger in her mouth...
...My body is weak and my stomach hurts when I laugh...
...Young women enter to pour them tea as Chinese soap operas play in the background...
...There, there it is...
...I have no choice...
...he says...
...He sits on his posh furniture next to a buddy holding a slingshot...
...His office is in a large building that makes up part of the new Guiyu skyline...
...I used to drive trucks, but I couldn't find a job so I had to come here and burn the rubbish," the forty-year-old says...
...The Times of India reports that "electronic waste is giving the country a big headache" and that India has become a "favorite dumping ground for countries like the U.S., Malaysia, Sweden, Canada, and Singapore...
...An immediate noxious thickness enters your mouth, a toxic attack on all skin...
...Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Inc...
...I think the wires are toxic, but I don't know...
...Private traders import millions of gallons of water to the town and sell it at a premium to residents...
...That's the same as a twenty-two-story pile of e-waste covering the entire 472 square miles of the City of Los Angeles," says the Computer TakeBack Campaign, an effort by a consortium of thirteen environmental organizations...
...James Songqing is one such boss...
...now it's a city with big buildings and rich people...
...households own a computer and have, on average, two to three old computers stored away in the basement or garage...
...Careful...
...Chen at a local health clinic...
...Desolate mountains of electronic trash are everywhere, as hundreds of trucks drive over burnt circuit boards, the intricate crunch audible from almost a mile away...
...E-waste is just one profitable coping mechanism for rural China...
...Less than one-fourth of a teaspoon of mercury can contaminate more than 400 acres of a lake, making the fish unsafe to eat...
...On his front patio lie about two tons of untreated bronze in large white sacks...
...China is not only a computer dumping ground...
...This area was so poor, and it was hard to grow rice, so about a decade ago people began picking up rubbish to look for valuables...
...My skin itches all the time," he says...
...Dogs with diseased eyes are chained to e-waste "farmhouses" of moldy concrete walls...
...Outside the United States, there have been some successes...
...For instance, IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Sony all manufacture electronic goods in China...
...Finally, China gets them back as rubbish...
...The law has no effect here," says He Hai, who smuggled circuit boards to Guiyu as the e-waste boom took off...
...Computer waste from the West has made this poor mainland farming region an ecological disaster area...
...The photographer's every movement makes him jumpabit, and he receives the snap of her camera like the crack of a machine gun...
...Hai says bribery is prevalent, as is intimidation...
...They really will kill you...
...Instead, they take hammers, chisels, and cutting torches to computers, keyboards, speakers, and other sorts of e-waste and smash them to bits for scrap metal, toner, gold, and reusable chips...
...It is outside," Songqing says...
...have dodged their responsibility for management of products at the end of their useful life, while public policy has failed to promote producer take back, clean design, and clean production," says the Computer TakeBack Campaign...
...It's plenty dangerous...
...It's in the interests of our country to stop e-waste," he says...
...I've had many health problems," Li Sheng Cui says...
...A thirty-five-year-old migrant from Sichuan province, Guang has warts, burns, and rashes up and down his arms...
...She cringes and blinks erratically...
...Workers there don't refurbish and sell the computers...
...In front of us sprawl colossal piles of smoldering green computer circuit boards...
...We drive clandestinely, heads ducked, bodies curled up, eyes downward...
...China's opening to international markets and capital has greatly exacerbated the divide between urban middle class wealth and the rural poor," says Yun Xien, a local environmental activist...
...Benjamin Joffe-Walt is a freelance writer based in South Africa...
...the driver points...
...Everything seems peaceful, but this place is very dangerous," he says...
...But reforms are lagging in the United States...
...Everyone here gets money from this kind of thing, so no one can afford to let it stop...
...He gets frustrated immediately and says he has to go...
...This is the underbelly of China's economic boom...
...I don't care for these questions of health and responsibility," he says...
...My family is here, and if I have no work we couldn't live, so I don't care how dangerous it is...
...We try to ask him more about his life, but his tune has changed...
...When I came, it was a one-story village with all dirt roads...
...Environmental Protection Agency estimated that it is ten times cheaper to ship them to Asia than to recycle them in the United States...
...We should stop e-waste altogether because it is foreign countries' rubbish...
...The Computer TakeBack Campaign seeks to pressure "consumer electronics manufacturers and brand owners to take full responsibility for the lifecycle of their products...
...International watchdog groups estimate that the United States alone exported more than $1 billion worth of electronic waste to China last year while receiving virtually none from China...
Vol. 69 • January 2005 • No. 1
