subject: Where computers go to die posted: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 01:05:46 -0000
Posted on Sat, Nov. 23, 2002
Where computers go to die
POOR CITIES IN CHINA BECOME DUMPING GROUND FOR E-WASTE
By Karl Schoenberger
Mercury News
GUIYU, China - Here in southern China, where the gritty air stings
your throat and circuit boards pile up like dry leaves in the gutter,
a group of women squat on the sidewalk using their bare hands to pull
apart the hazardous guts of a small mountain of PCs.
This is where many of America's computers go to die.
In the Pearl River Delta less than 180 miles away, in factories as
immaculate as Guiyu is filthy, growing legions of young women work up
to 18 hours a day, soldering chips and wires to motherboards, making
the PC boxes that one day will bear the name of Hewlett-Packard or
Dell or IBM.
This is where the world's personal computers are born.
A computer may spend its working days in a comfortable home in Boston
or in a programmer's cubicle in San Jose. But at both ends, the dirty
work behind a typical PC's life is done in China. This is the dark
secret of a famously ``clean industry.''
At the front end, the industry relies on cheap overseas labor working
long hours to make a profit on computers even as they fall in price.
At the back end, the industry downplays its responsibility for the
toxic chemicals and metals used in its short-lived products.
In the Pearl River Delta and other regions, spotless new factories
have made China the world's premier electronics workshop by drawing
young women from the desperately poor countryside to work most of
their waking hours for 30 cents an hour. These are the kind of labor
practices made notorious by apparel factories used by Nike and the
Gap in the 1990s.
In Guiyu, as in similar dumping grounds in India, Pakistan and the
Philippines, migrant workers are paid pennies to crack open and sort
the parts of monitors and circuit boards, exposing themselves to
toxic metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. They burn PVC cables to
extract copper, poisoning the air. They dip circuit boards and chips
in acid to recover small amounts of gold, inhaling the fumes and
dumping the acid into a nearby river that is dying.
``Rather than having to face the e-waste problem squarely, the United
States has made use of a convenient, and until now, hidden escape
valve: exporting the crisis to developing countries in Asia,'' the
environmental groups Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Basel Action
Network stated in a recent report.
This fall a Mercury News reporter and photographer set out to
chronicle this complex cycle, from a computer's birth to its death,
and document the little-known story behind Silicon Valley's
celebrated success. Its sheer scale is formidable: This year, the
global computer industry produced its billionth PC, and it is
expected to make 1 billion more by 2008.
Our journey begins in Guiyu, on the banks of the Lianjiang River, its
sluggish waters contaminated by shards of lead-shielded glass from
computer monitors that crossed the Pacific in containers of
electronic trash.
Could this be your old PC that Li Xiu Lan has in her hands?
Escaping poverty
• From farm towns to industrial zone
Li traveled the breadth of China to escape destitution in Sichuan
province. Here on a Guiyu sidewalk, she is pulling apart a PC
carcass, earning about 17 cents an hour as she exposes herself to a
witch's brew of chemicals without gloves, goggles or other
protection.
``I don't know yet if I like this work,'' said Li, 30, who had been
on the job about one month. ``But back home there are no jobs. There
is no money. There is nothing to do.''
Guiyu stands out as a relatively prosperous pocket of activity
compared with Shantou, a coastal city that the economic boom left
behind. But incoming electronic trash litters the town, from bales of
plastic monitor shells in a back alley to heaps of cell phone casings
on the sidewalk of a grubby street where people live in concrete-
block houses above recycling workshops.
A decade ago, this was an idyllic cluster of farming villages nestled
around the pristine Lianjiang River. Now the stale air in town is
choked with fumes that burn the throat -- a condition that
environmental investigators partly attribute to nighttime burning of
cables to recover their copper.
Guiyu became a symbol of the global e-waste problem after
environmentalists investigated conditions here a year ago. They
released their findings in February in a report published by the
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and the Seattle-based Basel Action
Network.
The report, ``Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,''
indicted the U.S. computer industry for not taking responsibility for
the toxic substances that are built into its products. Instead of
allowing the problem to be exported, it argued, brand-name PC makers
should design products for easier recycling and should monitor the
integrity of U.S. scrap recycling. The report also rebuked the U.S.
government for failing to ratify the 1992 Basel Convention and an
amendment to the accord that would ban exports of hazardous
electronic waste. And it embarrassed China, which had ratified both
the convention and the amendment yet allowed cities like Guiyu to
subsist on imported scrap.
U.S. recycling companies were denounced for their ``dirty little
secret.'' Many of these companies were collecting monitors and PCs,
but instead of recycling them under U.S. standards for hazardous-
waste handling, they were shipping the scrap to Asia, where there is
a ravenous, unregulated market and wages are dirt-cheap.
Tech export
• Most of U.S. scrap is shipped overseas
An estimated 50 percent to 80 percent of the electronic waste
collected for recycling in the Western United States ends up shipped
to developing countries, and scrap brokers in China are the biggest
buyers, industry sources say. Electronic-trash recycling is a
lucrative niche in the waste industry.
``You get paid to pick it up, and you get paid by people who want to
take it away,'' said the head of a major recycling company who asked
not to be identified.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 1999 that only
about 18 percent of all discarded computers were being recycled, the
rest presumably left in storage or going into landfills. That would
amount to about 12.8 million computers feeding the electronic-trash
supply chains this year.
The tech industry has distanced itself from the problem of e-waste
exports, but is grappling with the demand for domestic recycling
solutions.
The Electronic Industries Alliance said recently that its members are
``working hard to provide Californians with several immediate options
to help with the creation of a recycling industry.''
In China, the central government has tried repeatedly to stop imports
of hazardous material over the past decade, but has been stymied by
the nation's poorly developed rule of law and the central
government's limited ability to enforce its will in outlying
provinces.
Beijing cracked down in Guiyu after the state-run broadcasting
network documented the hazardous electronic-scrap recycling in 2000.
Later that year, a Hong Kong magazine published an account of Guiyu's
environmental blight, citing tests indicating alarming levels of lead
in the Lianjiang River.
Then came ``Exporting Harm'' and its international exposure.
Owners identified
• Investigators find lead, other metals
HP, IBM and Kmart were among the brand names on the tags and labels
fastened to the scrapped electronics products videotaped by the
investigators. Former owners identified on the tags included San
Francisco State University, the Los Angeles Unified School District
and Xerox Corp. A 16-inch Sony color monitor previously owned by the
U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency found its way to Guiyu.
The Basel Action Network and undercover investigators from Greenpeace
China collected sediment and water samples from the Lianjiang for
testing by an internationally accredited testing agency in Hong Kong.
One water sample showed levels of lead to be 190 times higher than
the threshold set by the World Health Organization for drinking
water. The lab also found sky-high levels of lead, zinc and chromium
in one of two sediment samples.
The water is so filthy that Guiyu residents now rely on a town 30
miles away for their drinking water, which rickety three-wheel trucks
bring in orange plastic tanks.
No one is studying workers in places like Guiyu for the health
effects of hazardous electronic waste, but there are anecdotal
reports of respiratory, skin and stomach problems, and an increasing
number of miscarriages in the area.
Embarrassed, Chinese officials rushed to Guiyu this year to try to
clean up the mess and place it out of sight. Police detained and
interrogated a correspondent for Japan's major economic daily, the
Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 30 minutes after he arrived in April.
Authorities effectively made Guiyu off limits to foreign reporters
and Western diplomats without an official invitation and a guided
tour that did not permit sightseeing along the toxic river.
When the Mercury News explored Guiyu in late September to corroborate
environmentalists' findings, there were no signs of a police presence
on the streets. But there was considerable apprehension among the
workers and scrap brokers who agreed to talk.
Workers unloading a truck full of computer chassis chased away the
Mercury News team. ``No pictures! No pictures!'' they shouted in
Mandarin.
A rough-looking scrap broker interrupted an interview with his
migrant laborers who were cooking motherboards over primitive
charcoal stoves beneath a shade tarp near the river, melting the lead
solder to retrieve chips and bits of wire.
Source of income
• E-waste a measure of Guiyu's prosperity
``We don't mean to pollute the environment,'' said the broker, who
appeared to be in his early 30s, as he beckoned the journalists into
a crumbling brick warehouse.
A green plastic bin of semiconductors rested on the coffee table
before him as the man held court, chain-smoking and surrounded by a
ragtag gang of associates. He said he was a Guiyu native but would
not give his name or allow photos.
``We're just peasants trying to make a decent living,'' he said.
``We're afraid of the government coming here and giving us trouble,
because our business is already suffering.'' The man suggested the
journalists should leave town, ``and don't come back tomorrow.''
Another Guiyu scrap dealer, Yang Xiong Hong, said he buys his
electronic waste from dealers in Guangzhou, the provincial capital,
and sells the salvaged material to specialized traders in town. He
admitted he was burning remnants of cables and motherboards ``at a
suitable location,'' but expressed no regrets.
``I can't control what goes on here,'' said the 24-year-old Yang, who
is saving money so he can move to Hong Kong and start a new life.
``If I didn't do this work, someone else would.''
Guiyu's recycling entrepreneurs insist they process only domestically
generated computer scrap, and worry that the ban on imported waste is
harming the town's primary source of income.
Officials in Beijing issued a statement Sept. 21 saying the
government had struck a blow to the inbound traffic in electronic
waste. Customs officials seized 22 containers sent from the United
States packed with electronic contraband in Wenzhou, about 400 miles
up the coast from Shantou.
The statement did not mention the thousands of cargo containers
unloaded at China's 45 major seaports daily, however. Nor were the
underpaid customs and public-security officials who live off petty
graft taken into account. The statement did not explain why trucks
bearing oceangoing containers were still rumbling into Guiyu that
very day.
``Things have been backed up for the past three months, and you can't
export to China now without a special connection,'' said Mark
Dallura, president of Chase Electronics, an electronic-scrap broker
outside Philadelphia. The former computer programmer said he exports
material though a Chinese agent in Los Angeles.
``We go through this about every year and a half,'' Dallura said.
``Then the flap dies down and it's business as usual.''
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