space Press Releases, News Stories

By John Gittings, The Guardian

SHANGHAI, 1 June 2002 -- Electronic scrap puts the lives of rural villagers at risk

Beijing has announced a clampdown on the import of electronic junk from the US and other developed countries which is being stripped by Chinese peasants in primitive and dangerous conditions.

The ban follows an outcry by western environmental groups and in the Chinese press about reports that young children are employed to smash up computers and that local water supplies have been poisoned by toxic waste.

A new list of banned items will include "TV sets, computers, Xerox machines, video cameras and telephones", according to the national environment agency.

Visitors to villages near Guiyu town in the southern province of Guangdong have seen printed circuit boards and other junk"cooked" over open fires to extract valuable metals.

One Chinese reporter saw a four-year old girl prising copper coils out of shattered components. "Completely unprotected, without even basic safety goggles, the girls pound away and laugh as bits of metal and plastic fly."

In Beilin village, the reporter noted, women armed with pliers worked in front of small furnaces "to retrieve chips from circuit boards immersed in pools of molten solder".

Raising fears that China was becoming a "dumping ground" for electronic junk, the country's environment agency said this week that police would crack down on "the smuggling of dangerous wastes". However, it appeared to leave a loophole by saying that if "proper methods" were used, the environment need not be harmed.

The trade in so-called e-waste in Guangdong has persisted in spite of claims last year that the provincial government was taking effective action.

Local dealers say they suspended work while inspections were being made, and residents claim that police officials have been paid off.

A Shanghai reporter who visited the Guiyu area under cover was threatened with violence when local bosses discovered his identity.

Earlier one of the bosses had told him that the local water was so polluted "that our faces come out in scabs if we wash in it".

Villagers say they know the health risks but have no alternative because the financial yield from farming is so low. In any case the land is now too poisoned to grow crops.

The environmental groups Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition said in a report this year that up to 80% of electronic waste from the US was shipped to countries in Asia including India, Pakistan and China.

The report cites three reasons why so much waste is exported from the US: labour costs in Asia are very low, environmental and occupational codes are poorly enforced, and US law does not impose any controls on such exports.

The US is the only industrialised country to have failed to ratify the 1989 UN Basel convention which calls for a total ban on the export of hazardous waste.

Most e-waste in Guiyu comes from the US with smaller amounts from Japan, South Korea and Europe. The report describes how printer cartridges are ripped apart to extract toner and aluminium, and cathode-ray tubes are hammered open for their copper yokes.

Because of ground water pollution, drinking water has to be trucked in. Irrigation canals have been filled with broken monitor glass laden with lead, and plastic e-waste.

Chinese press accounts suggest that up to 100,000 people may be employed in processing e-waste in Guiyu. Hundreds of truck journeys every day bring in supplies from the port of Nanhai - close to the provincial capital of Guangzhou - where the waste arrives in container loads.

Some operations were halted after earlier revelations in the Hong Kong press, and tougher controls are expected after the new ban. Even if these are effective the problems of resulting unemployment and land contamination remain to be tackled.