23 July 2007 - Guiyu, China
— Welcome to the Guiyu tea ceremony. Boss
Guo sets a pair of thimble sized tea cups
on a ceremonial tray. He half fills one of
the tiny cups with bottled, drinkable water.
In to the other he pours water from the well
in his backyard. Then he fills both up with
steaming Chinese tea. The cup with bottled
water turns a healthy amber. The one with
the well water instantly converts to an impenetrable
black.
Guo, a brash young man dressed in a purple
polyester suit and white shirt, doesn't know
why. He says he sees no connection between
the stacks of dismembered electrical equipment
behind us in his workshop and the strange
quality of his water. Still he won't drink
the black tea. "We won't even shower
with that water," he says.
Guiyu, near China's southeastern coast is
the centre of an uncontrolled environmental
disaster. Here and in several nearby townships,
electronic waste, most of it imported, is
broken up in small workshops. It's a version
of outsourcing that saves wealthier countries
the high cost of disposing of their electronic
trash. In this part of China recycling e-waste
is apparently free of any environmental or
health and safety regulation.
Filthy to apocalyptic
The result is a landscape that varies from
filthy to apocalyptic. In small workshops
and yards and in the open countryside workers
dismember the detritus of modernisation. Armed
mostly with small hand tools they take apart
old computers, monitors, printers, video and
DVD players, photocopying machines, telephones
and phone chargers, music speakers, car batteries
and microwave ovens.
The scrap sites here are a profusion of technology
brand names; HP, Dell, Compaq, IBM, Apple,
Sun, NEC, LG and Motorola are just some of
the names we found in the piles of tech junk.
They are made in the US, Japan, Korea, Taiwan,
Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Austria,
Germany and UK.
Chinese man smelts computer parts in the open
air to extract metals. Open air burning of
computer waste releases large amounts of toxic
fumes. (© Greenpeace/Lai Yun) Chinese
law forbids the importation of electronic
waste and Beijing is also a signatory to the
Basel Convention, an international treaty
banning the shipment of e-waste from the developed
to the developing world. But so far official
prohibitions have been about as effective
as the official banners urging environmental
protection that flap in the breeze above the
trash congested streets of Guiyu.
A rash of similar waste sites has broken
out further up the coast. Enforcement is difficult
because China's economic boom is the driving
force behind price hikes on the world's metals
markets. Raging domestic demand has China
sucking in metals in any form it can. In such
a market the demand for scrap metals, including
electronic waste is enormous.
View the slideshow on e-waste in China
And there's an important push factor; the
high cost of disposing and recycling of electronic
waste in developed countries. The cost of
landfill is increasing and several European
countries and some US states have banned outright
the disposal of e-waste in landfills or by
incineration.
Some in China are fighting back against the
avalanche of imported junk. An increasingly
vocal environmental lobby inside and outside
government is helping push through new legislation
in an effort to stem the tide of imports,
as well as the increasing swell of domestically
produced electronic waste. They will also
seek to reduce the number of toxins used in
manufacturing electronic equipment.
Unaware of these issues, workers in Guiyu
painstakingly reduce every piece of equipment
to its smallest components. These are then
farmed off to 'specialists', workers dedicated
to stripping wires for the copper they contain
or melting the lead solder from circuit boards.
Others place circuit boards in open acid
baths to separate precious metals including
the tiny quantities of gold and palladium
they contain. Plastics are graded by quality
and other parts are burned to separate plastic
from scrap metal. After this thorough dismembering
any remaining combustibles are left to burn
in open fires leaving an acrid stench of plastic,
rubber and paint in the air.
A heavily polluted stream in Guiyu. Along
side domestic rubbish the water is badly polluted
with toxic waste from the e-waste recycling
yards in the town. (© Greenpeace/Natalie
Behring) The environmental cost is real. Streams
are black and pungent and choked with industrial
waste. Kevin Brigden, from the Greenpeace
Research Laboratories, tested streams in the
Guiyu area and found acid baths leaching into
them. The streams had a Ph of a strong acid.
That's powerful enough to disintegrate a penny
after a few hours, says Brigden. (Download
the full scientific report on pollution in
Guiyu).
There's also an economic cost. In Guiyu the
price of water is ten times more than in Chendian,
the neighbouring township that is today the
main source of Guiyu's water. "We used
to draw our water from the lake," says
an elderly man, jerking his head in the direction
of the putrid cesspit we had driven past a
few minutes before. "But that was nearly
20 years ago," he says. On the baking
street in front of him a huge orange plastic
tank perched on the back of a three wheeled
agriculture vehicle dispenses water to Guiyu
residents.
The digital divide
In the past two decades incomes have risen
sharply even as the quality of the environment
has plunged. The locals, who were initially
driven to garbage recycling by their poverty,
have become middle class. Unburdened by the
costs of safe recycling, the economics behind
e-waste disposal in Guiyu can mean a profitable
living.
Many of the locals have moved out of their
traditional single story homes into newly
built three and four storey buildings where
the ground floor is reserved as a scrap-sorting
workshop. Now they employ migrant workers
to risk their health in this toxic business.
Young workers "bake" computer motherboards
from e-waste in a workshop to remove valuable
metals. The baking produces highly dangerous
fumes and toxic waste which is then dumped.
(© Greenpeace/Natalie Behring) For the
migrants, this is as close as they'll come
to bridging the digital divide. Xiao Li has
never sat at a computer, logged on to the
internet, used a printer or a photocopier
but he has spent the last six years processing
high tech equipment from around the world.
He makes around US$5 per day melting lead
solder off circuit boards and says that life
is better here than in his remote farming
village in the mountains of Sichuan.
But is this a better life? Most of these
peasants turned workers say it is, albeit
by a small margin. "It's a bit better
than home," says one weary middle aged
woman from Henan's Shangqiu county who works
out of a rough shack inside a scrap yard,
"there it's too poor, we barely had enough
to eat." She makes between 200 and 300
yuan (US$ 24 - US$ 36) per month in Guiyu.
Xiao Li, who has been here longer and makes
more money, has a TV and a mobile phone and
shares a room in one of the old village houses
rented out by the local owners who have moved
into a four storey house in the township.
He doesn't mind the pollution. "We are
used to it," says the cheery 22 year
old, "and there is no impact on my health."
Lead poisoning
He is probably wrong. Only limited investigations
have been carried out on the health effects
of Guiyu's poisoned environment, but those
that have paint an alarming picture. One of
them was carried out by Professor Huo Xia
(full study), of the Shantou University Medical
College, an hour and a half's drive from Guiyu.
She tested 165 children for concentrations
of lead in their blood. Eighty two percent
of the Guiyu children had blood/lead levels
of more than 100. Anything above that figure
is considered unsafe by international health
experts. The average reading for the group
was 149.
High levels of lead in young children's blood
can impact IQ and the development of the central
nervous system. The highest concentrations
of lead were found in the children of parents
whose workshop dealt with circuit boards and
the lowest was among those who recycled plastic.
A separate report by the Shantou Medical
University Hospital in November 2003 found
a high incidence of skin damage, headaches,
vertigo, nausea, chronic gastritis, and gastric
and duodenal ulcers, especially among migrants
who recycle circuit boards and plastic.
A local doctor told us there was also a higher
than normal incidence of miscarriages and
handicapped babies among those who worked
with e-waste. Much of this kind of information
remains anecdotal because the hospitals have
not been authorised to fully investigate the
incidence of waste related illness among their
patients he said.
The veil of silence means that nobody is
held to account for the environmental and
human impact of globalisation in Guiyu. There
are plenty of people who should be held accountable
and some who should not: "Lots of people
are responsible, says Dr. Huo, "the bosses
who run these businesses, the companies who
ship the material and many others, she says,
"but certainly not the workers. They
are poor peasants and don't understand the
damage this does to them."
Workers unpack a truck-load of e-waste which
has just arrived for processing in Guiyu in
Guangzhou province. (© Greenpeace/Natalie
Behring) Meanwhile the junk keeps coming to
Guiyu. Imports of e-waste have been illegal
in China since 1996 so there are no official
figures on how much is coming into the country.
Environmental activists and academics in Guangdong
estimate that Guiyu alone handles over a million
tonnes of e-waste annually. Whatever the figure
it is obvious to any visitor that the trade
goes on unhindered; scrap yards are piled
high with imported waste and trucks can be
seen unloading new cargo daily.
Stemming the toxic tide
Guiyu is one of the most graphic examples
of digital dumps but similar places can be
found across Asia and in certain locations
in Africa. With amounts of e-waste growing
rapidly each year urgent solutions are required.While
the waste continues to flow into digital dumps
like Guiyu there are measures that can help
stem the toxic tide of e-waste.
Major electronics firms should remove the
worst chemicals to make their products safer
and easier to recycle. All companies must
take full responsibility for their products
and, once they reach the end of their useful
life, take their goods back for re-use, safe
recycling or disposal. We are pressuring major
electronic makers to reduce the toxicity and
amount of e-waste being dumped every year.
You can also do your part by supporting companies
that make are making an effort to clean up
their act by checking our Guide to Greener
Electronics. Think twice before buying whether
you really need a new device and return your
old equipment to the manufacturer if possible.
