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By Christian M. Wade, UPI Correspondent From the Science and Technology Desk

TAIZHOU, China, 10 June 2002 -- Dong Fei dangles a green computer circuit board over an open fire as plumes of black smoke and the smell of melting solder fill the small corner of the factory.

"You have to be careful not to inhale the fumes," she said, peeling computer chips off the twisted boards with a pair of pliers. "Sure, it's dangerous work, but we have to earn money somehow."

Nearby, several women pound away at computer monitors and keyboards with hammers and other tools, separating the plastic shells from brass screws, nuts and other valuable metal parts.

Workers search through piles of plastics and wires to extract gold, melting and burning soldered circuit boards to remove silicon computer chips, and break open lead-laden cathode ray tubes.

Residents of a nearby village say there are hundreds of computer salvage yards scattered around the outskirts of Taizhou, a coastal city in China's eastern Zhejiang province, employing thousands of migrant workers. At night, the odor of burning plastic can be smelt miles away from the plants.

Most of the foreign computer junk in the salvage yards comes from the United States and Japan according to one owner, who only gave his surname, Hong. Some refuse bears visible signs of other countries -- several junked hard drives were marked "Property of the City of Los Angeles".

The owner said he gets the junk computer parts from a Hong Kong-based scrap dealer for about $500 a ton. Anything of value is saved and sold for scrap, the rest is burned in piles at the factory.

Foreign computer waste has developed into a staple industry in Taizhou and other impoverished regions of China, where state industry reforms have forced tens of millions into unemployment.

Environmental groups say the primitive methods of extraction release dangerous chemicals into the air and poison streams and drinking water wells. Health experts warn computer waste contains a host of deadly ingredients, including lead, beryllium, mercury and cadmium.

A report released in February by a team of environmental and health groups detailed the plight of villagers in Guiyu, a town in southern Guangdong province, where the investigative team saw tons of electronic waste dumped along rivers, in open fields and irrigation canals in the rice fields.

The impact of the industry on neighboring villages had been so devastating that well water in is no longer drinkable and water must be trucked in from 30 kilometers away, the report said.

The group blamed the U.S. government for sanctioning the illegal trade in used computer parts.

"We further discovered that rather than banning it, the U.S. government is actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the U.S. daily," the group's coordinator Jim Puckett wrote in the report.

Although U.S. manufacturers and waste managers have made some efforts to reclaim and recycle some of the most toxic of these ingredients, the report said, hazardous waste landfills in China, India and other developing countries in Asia are overflowing with American high-tech waste.

Chinese officials have pledged to crack down on illegal imports of computer parts and other high-tech trash, urging the United States to join the 1989 Basel Convention, a United Nations treaty banning exports of used computer parts containing toxic chemicals such as lead and mercury.

China signed the treaty in 1991, but the United States has not yet ratified the U.N. convention.

Copyright © 2002 United Press International