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| Toxic Trade News / March/April 2005 |
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Hazards of High Tech
by Mike McPhate, Sierra Club
March/April 2005– Giant heaps of computer scrap clog the dusty lanes of Mandoli, a squalid neighborhood on the east side of New Delhi. Dark gray clouds rise from the clanking bowels of more than a dozen high-walled buildings, choking the air and shrouding the sun. A knee-deep pile of green circuit boards, picked clean of metal, spills into a dirt lane from one of the building's doors. Inside, women squat in a circle amid discarded computer parts and several big blue barrels, pulling apart electrical plugs with their bare hands.
Yes, says Narender Kumar, a police officer patrolling the area, the plants are illegally recycling computer parts. But that's for the "magistrate" to deal with, he says.
The short working life span of computers--about three years--has created an enormous tide of obsolete units. While the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the West has helped expand India's middle class, the detritus of the technological age ends up in the country as well. Computer waste is sneaked past customs officials, then transferred by truck to a storage yard on New Delhi's southern edge.
Scrap bidders divvy up the units and then sell their parts among various neighborhoods, each with its particular recycling specialty. The recyclers, many of them women and children, use fire and dangerous acids to melt down the computers' innards, releasing a smoky stream of lead, dioxin, and other pollutants in exchange for small amounts of valuable metals. (A truck driver eating a plate of rice in a nearby waste-strewn lot says that every day he transports about 2,400 kilos of copper from the dense rows of factories into the city.) These laborers, who earn about $1 per day, must choose "between poisons and livelihoods," says Kishore Wankhade of Toxics Link, a Delhi-based group that monitors the handling of electronic waste.
At the end of an alley in the slum neighborhood of Silampur, a doctor presses his stethoscope to the chest of a skinny, middle-aged laborer. The man shows "classic" symptoms of lung disease: shortness of breath and coughing up blood. The number of such patients at his clinic has grown rapidly, says Dr. B. B. Wadhwa. "It's because of the burning wires." The main medical clinic in Mandoli reports a sharp increase in the number of patients with lung ailments. Chief Medical Officer Priya T. Kumar says the hospital sees much younger patients than it did only a few years ago; they arrive with asthma, bronchitis, and chronic lung infections.
A Carnegie Mellon University study estimated that in 2002 the United States sent about 10 million computer units to Asia for recycling. The United States is the only developed nation not to ratify the international waste treaty, the Basel Convention, which forbids the export of computer waste. In 2003, California passed a law forcing computer manufacturers to take more responsibility for recycling, but it failed to ban the cheapest method of doing so: export. As long as computer users and the computer industry refuse to clean up after themselves, people in Silampur, Mandoli, and scores of other communities will pay the price instead.
FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The Basel Action Network is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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