A Chinese child sits amongst a pile of wires and e-waste. Children can often be found dismantling e-waste containing many hazardous chemicals known to be potentially very damaging to children's health.
Because our mobile phones, computers and other electronic products are
made using toxic ingredients, workers at production
sites are at risk of exposure and the products cannot be recycled
safely when they are discarded.
Many are routinely, and often illegally, shipped as waste from
Europe, US and Japan to Asia because it is cheaper and easier to
dump
the problem on poor countries that have low
environmental standards than to tackle it at home.
Conditions where electronic waste (e-waste) is scrapped in
southern China are truly shocking. One of our scientists, Kevin
Brigden, who has visited his fair share of the world's toxic
hotspots, described the scene: "The conditions in these yards are
horrific. In Guiyu, southeast China, I found acid baths leaching into streams. They were
so acidic they could dissolve a coin in just hours. Many of the
chemicals used in electronics are dangerous and can damage people
even at very low levels of exposure."
We are conducting ongoing investigations into scrap yards in
India and China, where we have found people taking the
e-waste apart by hand and being exposed to a nasty
cocktail of dangerous chemicals.
Take a trip through the electronics lifecycle to discover why it's a problem and what can be done about it:
Why Hewlett-Packard?
Taking toxic chemicals out of products makes reuse and recycling
of electronic products safer, easier and cheaper. This is the first
step in tackling the problem of e-waste.
We have asked all the top mobile phone and computer companies
worldwide to clean up their act. Samsung,
Sony, Sony Ericsson and Nokia have already taken a first step
by committing to eliminate toxic flame retardants and PVC plastic
from some of their products.
But Hewlett Packard has made no such committment, nor
have Apple, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, LG, Motorola, Panasonic, or
Toshiba. At a major technology expo in Beijing we built a statue
using the companies' e-waste collected from scrap yards in China to
demonstrate the problem these companies are causing.
Once toxic chemicals have been eliminated from products, manufacturers should
take full life cycle 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. This is what we are
campaigning for: to turn back the toxic tide of e-waste.
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