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By Brian Bergstein, AP Business Writer

SAN JOSE, CA, 25 February 2002 --What happened to that old computer after you sold it to a secondhand parts dealer?

Environmental groups say there's a good chance it ended up in a Third World dump, where thousands of laborers burn, smash and pick apart electronic waste to scavenge for the precious metals inside — unwittingly exposing themselves and their surroundings to innumerable toxic hazards.

A report being released Monday documents one such "cyber-age nightmare" — a cluster of villages in southeastern China where computers still bearing the labels of their former owners in America are ripped apart and discarded along rivers and fields.

The authors of the report, called "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia," hope it puts pressure on U.S. companies and lawmakers to increase domestic recycling efforts.

Investigators who visited the waste sites in Guiyu, China, in December saw men, women and children pulling wires from computers and burning them, fouling the air with carcinogenic smoke.

Other laborers, making $1.50 a day and working with little or no protection, burned plastics and circuit boards or poured acid on electronic parts to extract silver and gold. Some smashed lead-impregnated cathode ray tubes from computer monitors, the report said.

Consequently, the ground water is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in, the report said. One river sample in the area had 190 times the pollution levels allowed under World Health Organization (news - web sites) guidelines.

"I've seen a lot of dirty operations in Third World countries, but what was shocking was seeing all this post-consumer waste," said one of the report's authors, Jim Puckett of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network. "This is all stuff from you and me."

A 1989 treaty known as the Basel Convention restricts such exports of hazardous materials, but the United States has not ratified it.

Computer waste in particular is becoming a difficult problem, with millions of devices becoming obsolete each year.

California and Massachusetts have banned cathode ray tube monitors from landfills and incinerators. A few PC makers and large retailers have launched recycling programs, but they require consumers to pay around $30 and ship their old PCs themselves.

With no organized system of electronics recycling such as Japan and some European countries have, much of the nation's e-waste is passed along a difficult-to-track chain of resellers and parts brokers, said Ted Smith, head of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which also prepared the new report.

The report says some in the industry estimate that as much as 50 to 80 percent of the United States' electronic waste that is collected in the name of recycling actually gets shipped out of the country.

That often involves operations like the dump in Guiyu or similar ones in India and Pakistan, where labor is so cheap it is cost-effective to try to salvage every last screw or bit of silver.

"Everybody knows this is going on, but is just embarrassed and don't really know what to do about it," Smith said. "They would just prefer to ignore it."

Several organizations believe the cost of recycling a computer should be added to the initial purchase price — much like a bottle deposit — to fund clean and efficient recycling programs.

A few states are considering such plans, including California, where two state senators last week introduced bills that would slap fees on electronics to pay for reducing e-waste.

Some reputable electronics recyclers and resellers are already taking steps to ensure that they don't transfer parts to someone who might dump it overseas, said David Jones, a waste management official in the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites)'s Southwest regional office.

"They know it's a matter of time before someone knocks on their door and says `Do you know where your stuff goes?'" Jones said.

But real change will come only with public pressure for a real recycling program, Jones said.

"I think this report will be good in having the effect of making people question stuff," he said.

On the Net: Basel Action Network: http://www.ban.org Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: http://www.svtc.org Basel Convention: http://www.basel.int