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Recycling Today

SAN FRANCISCO, California, 8 May 2002 -- Electronics industry representatives got a chance on Tuesday to see the worst-case scenario of where some of their products are ending their life cycles.

In a presentation at the International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment in San Francisco, footage shot by the Basel Action Network of working and living conditions in the city of Guiyu, China, was shown. Guiyu has become a hub for illegal and unsafe recycling operations in China.

During an undercover visit to Guiyu in December of 2001, representatives of the Basel Action Network, Seattle, saw and taped villagers manually cracking leaded-glass computer monitors to retrieve the copper yokes within. The men, women and children of Guiyu also conduct open burning of PVC-coated wire and cable; they “grill” circuit boards to melt the lead solder to remove chips; and they work with a 75 percent hydrochloric acid solution to separate precious metals from circuit boards.

The amounts of scrap computers, monitors and printers is staggering, overflowing in large piles in the front and back yards of villagers who work from their homes or other small locations.

The acid stripping operations, along with the open dumping of waste and ash residue into ditches and riverbeds, has rendered the well water and ground water of Guiyu undrinkable. For the past five years, water has been trucked in from distant villages.

One villager told the taping crew that in a span of five years, Guiyu had gone from a bucolic rice-growing village to “a bustling, sprawling junkyard.” He noted that while water may be trucked in, some villagers still wash their vegetables in the contaminated water, and by breathing in the fumes generated by open burning, “many villagers have become weak.”

The taping crew examined pieces of computer equipment hauled into the village, and spotted identification labels from such entities as the City of Los Angeles, the State of California and the L.A. Unified School District. Such equipment and its components lay in heaps along the roadsides and in the ditches and creek beds of Guiyu.

The tape or the accompanying print report of conditions in Guiyu, called "Exporting Harm," can be obtained from the Basel Action Network at its Web site, www.ban.org.

Basel Action Network’s Jim Puckett remarked, “In a bid to avoid landfills, a worse alternative may have been found. Nobody bothered to look at what goes on in China.”

Lauren Roman of United Recycling Industries, West Chicago, Ill., noted that brokers in the U.S. shipping to China have been able to undercut domestic recyclers, resulting “in the export of between 50 percent and 80 percent of all electronic waste sent for recycling from U.S. sources.”

According to both Puckett and Roman, many equipment manufacturers and generators of scrap computer equipment have already pledged to more carefully audit their recycling contractors and brokers to ensure they are not part of the Guiyu problem.

The reaction of the Chinese government to the findings in Guiyu has been swift: It immediately banned the import of electronic scrap into China.

“On paper, China has banned the import of material such as cathode ray tubes, computers and circuit boards,” said Puckett. “But there is a huge amount of corruption at the customs level,” he added, noting that containers of material accompanied by the appropriate bribe amount may still be making their way to Guiyu.