Toxic tea party

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Tea made with imported water and a dark, murky tea made with polluted local water. The local water makes the tea turn black, probably due to the horrific groundwater pollution from Guiyu's e-waste yards.

Guo, a brash young man dressed in a purple polyester suit and whiteshirt, doesn't know why. He says he sees no connection between thestacks of dismembered electrical equipment behind us in his workshopand the strange quality of his water. Still he won't drink the blacktea. "We won't even shower with that water," he says.

Guiyu,near China's southeastern coast is the centre of an uncontrolledenvironmental 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 highcost of disposing of their electronic trash. In this part of Chinarecycling e-waste is apparently free of any environmental or health andsafety regulation.

Filthy to apocalyptic

The resultis a landscape that varies from filthy to apocalyptic. In smallworkshops and yards and in the open countryside workers dismember thedetritus of modernisation. Armed mostly with small hand tools they takeapart old computers, monitors, printers, video and DVD players,photocopying machines, telephones and phone chargers, music speakers,car batteries and microwave ovens.

Chinese law forbids the importationof electronic waste and Beijing is also a signatory to the BaselConvention, an international treaty banning the shipment of e-wastefrom the developed to the developing world. But so far officialprohibitions have been about as effective as the official bannersurging environmental protection that flap in the breeze above the trashcongested streets of Guiyu.

A rash of similar waste sites hasbroken out further up the coast. Enforcement is difficult becauseChina's economic boom is the driving force behind price hikes on theworld's metals markets. Raging domestic demand has China sucking inmetals in any form it can. In such a market the demand for scrapmetals, including electronic waste is enormous.

Andthere's an important push factor; the high cost of disposing andrecycling of electronic waste in developed countries. The cost oflandfill is increasing and several European countries and some USstates have banned outright the disposal of e-waste in landfills or byincineration.

Some in China are fighting back against theavalanche of imported junk. An increasingly vocal environmental lobbyinside and outside government is helping push through new legislationin an effort to stem the tide of imports, as well as the increasingswell of domestically produced electronic waste. They will also seek toreduce the number of toxins used in manufacturing electronic equipment.

Unawareof these issues, workers in Guiyu painstakingly reduce every piece ofequipment to its smallest components. These are then farmed off to'specialists', workers dedicated to stripping wires for the copper theycontain or melting the lead solder from circuit boards.

Othersplace circuit boards in open acid baths to separate precious metalsincluding the tiny quantities of gold and palladium they contain.Plastics are graded by quality and other parts are burned to separateplastic from scrap metal. After this thorough dismembering anyremaining combustibles are left to burn in open fires leaving an acridstench of plastic, rubber and paint in the air.

Theenvironmental cost is real. Streams are black and pungent and chokedwith industrial waste. Kevin Brigden, from the Greenpeace ResearchLaboratories, tested streams in the Guiyu area and found acid bathsleaching into them. The streams had a Ph of a strong acid. That'spowerful enough to disintegrate a penny after a few hours, says Brigden. ( Download the full scientific report on pollution in Guiyu).

There'salso an economic cost. In Guiyu the price of water is ten times morethan in Chendian, the neighbouring township that is today the mainsource 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 putridcesspit we had driven past a few minutes before. "But that was nearly20 years ago," he says. On the baking street in front of him a hugeorange plastic tank perched on the back of a three wheeled agriculturevehicle dispenses water to Guiyu residents.

The digital divide

Inthe past two decades incomes have risen sharply even as the quality ofthe environment has plunged. The locals, who were initially driven togarbage recycling by their poverty, have become middle class.Unburdened by the costs of safe recycling, the economics behind e-wastedisposal in Guiyu can mean a profitable living.

Many of thelocals have moved out of their traditional single story homes intonewly built three and four storey buildings where the ground floor isreserved as a scrap-sorting workshop. Now they employ migrant workersto risk their health in this toxic business.

Forthe migrants, this is as close as they'll come to bridging the digitaldivide. 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 yearsprocessing high tech equipment from around the world. He makes aroundUS$5 per day melting lead solder off circuit boards and says that lifeis better here than in his remote farming village in the mountains ofSichuan.

But is this a better life? Most of these peasantsturned workers say it is, albeit by a small margin. "It's a bit betterthan home," says one weary middle aged woman from Henan's Shangqiucounty who works out of a rough shack inside a scrap yard, "there it'stoo poor, we barely had enough to eat." She makes between 200 and 300yuan (US$ 24 - US$ 36) per month in Guiyu.

Xiao Li, who hasbeen here longer and makes more money, has a TV and a mobile phone andshares a room in one of the old village houses rented out by the localowners who have moved into a four storey house in the township. Hedoesn't mind the pollution. "We are used to it," says the cheery 22year old, "and there is no impact on my health."

Lead poisoning

Heis probably wrong. Only limited investigations have been carried out onthe health effects of Guiyu's poisoned environment, but those that havepaint an alarming picture. One of them was carried out by Professor HuoXia (full study), of the Shantou University Medical College, an hour and a half'sdrive from Guiyu.

Highlevels of lead in young children's blood can impact IQ and thedevelopment of the central nervous system. The highest concentrationsof lead were found in the children of parents whose workshop dealt withcircuit boards and the lowest was among those who recycled plastic.

Aseparate report by the Shantou Medical University Hospital in November2003 found a high incidence of skin damage, headaches, vertigo, nausea,chronic gastritis, and gastric and duodenal ulcers, especially amongmigrants who recycle circuit boards and plastic.

Another recent study has revealed e-waste labourers in China have very high concentrations of toxic flame retardants in their bodies. One worker had by far the highest concentration ever reported.

A local doctortold us there was also a higher than normal incidence of miscarriagesand handicapped babies among those who worked with e-waste. Much ofthis kind of information remains anecdotal because the hospitals havenot been authorised to fully investigate the incidence of waste relatedillness among their patients he said.

The veil of silence meansthat nobody is held to account for the environmental and human impactof globalisation in Guiyu. There are plenty of people who should beheld accountable and some who should not: "Lots of people areresponsible, says Dr. Huo, "the bosses who run these businesses, thecompanies who ship the material and many others, she says, "butcertainly not the workers. They are poor peasants and don't understandthe damage this does to them."

Meanwhilethe junk keeps coming to Guiyu. Imports of e-waste have been illegal inChina since 1996 so there are no official figures on how much is cominginto the country. Environmental activists and academics in Guangdongestimate that Guiyu alone handles over a million tonnes of e-wasteannually. Whatever the figure it is obvious to any visitor that thetrade goes on unhindered; scrap yards are piled high with importedwaste and trucks can be seen unloading new cargo daily.

Stemming the toxic tide

Guiyuis one of the most graphic examples of digital dumps but similar placescan be found across Asia and in certain locations in Africa. Withamounts of e-waste growing rapidly each year urgent solutions arerequired.While the waste continues to flow into digital dumps likeGuiyu there are measures that can help stem the toxic tide of e-waste.

Majorelectronics firms should remove the worst chemicals to make theirproducts safer and easier to recycle. All companies must take fullresponsibility for their products and, once they reach the end of theiruseful life, take their goods back for re-use, safe recycling ordisposal. 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.

Take action

Challenge the major companies in the electronics industry to be the first to create a greener computer without the worst toxic chemicals.

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