China’s Toxic E-Waste Problem Growing

It’s estimated more than 1 million tons of e-waste is produced each year in China with little or no regulation on how to dispose of the toxic materials. One small southeastern Chinese town, Guiyu, is reported to be the center of e-waste disposal. There, according to an Associated Press story, migrant workers sit outside squalid homes, smashing picture tubes by hand to get glass and electronic parts, a practice that releases as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust. Others cook computer motherboards over gas burners to release gold and burn insulation from copper wires.

While China makes it’s own contribution, Greenpeace China in Beijing says most of the e-waste comes from outside China, although the country is catching up with its own waste, and little or nothing is being done to clean up the process. Greenpeace toxic campaigner Jamie Choi is quoted as saying some 10 million mobile phones, 5 million washing machines, 5 million television sets, and the same number in personal computers and refrigerators all end up on the toxic dump.

Of course, it’s the poor person who pays the price for reclaiming gold, copper and other valuable metals. They eke out a limited income and face incredible health risks in an economy that offers little or no health benefits.

How does tons of toxic waste find its way to China’s dumps? Easy - it’s cheaper to ship it to that country, as well as other third world countries than to deal with it within our own heavily regulated shores. Now we’re talking about 20 to 50 million tons of globally produced electronic waste, with about 70 percent being shipped to poor nations around the world. American manufacturers are allowed to send the waste abroad because Congress has yet to ratify the Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to reduce the movement of hazardous waste between nations. The United States, Haiti and Afghanistan have signed the Convention but have not yet ratified it. No surprise here, considering this administration’s absolute lack of attention to environmental issues, focusing instead on an illegal war.

Back to China’s poor peasants who are risking their lives by releasing and reclaiming chemicals such as mercury, cobalt, barium, fluorine and, of course, the various metals. The report says the towns ground water supply is badly polluted, so much so that drinking water has to be trucked into the community. The entire area is, according to the article, one cesspool of electronic waste.

Guiyu isn’t the only community caught up in the recycling business, but they can’t compete with the growing tons of waste entering the country every day. What isn’t reclaimed is dumped into holes in the ground, with little or no regulation.

Mother earth and the poor will always pay the price for man’s greed, but I keep in mind the old saying, “what goes around comes around”. The poor may not be able to discipline us, but nature will, and quite probably has already begun the process.

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