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Associated Press

SAN JOSE, California, 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 dump in the developing world, 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 new report documents one such "cyber-age nightmare" — a cluster of villages in southeastern China where computers still bearing the labels of their one-time owners in America are ripped apart and strewn along rivers and fields.

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

Investigators who visited the waste sites in Guiyu, China, in December witnessed men, women and children pulling wires from computers and burning them at night, 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. Many pried open printer cartridges — whose hazards are uncertain — and smashed lead-laden cathode ray tubes from computer monitors, the report said.

Consequently, the ground water is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 18 miles away, the report said. One river sample in the area had 190 times the pollution levels allowed under World Health Organization 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."

It is no secret that hazardous materials from the world's leading economies often end up as detritus in the world's desperate places. A 1989 treaty known as the Basel Convention restricts such transfers, 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 as the technology industry produces faster, better and less expensive equipment.

Mindful of the dangers, 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 as Japan and some European countries have, much of the nation's e-waste ends up being 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% 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."

To make electronics manufacturers accountable for their obsolete products, several organizations believe the cost of recycling a computer should be added to the initial sales 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 in turn dump it overseas, said David Jones, a waste management official in the Environmental Protection Agency'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 electronics recycling program, Jones said, which is why he believes the report on Guiyu is important.

"It's good to me that people are trying to ground-truth this and not just listen to the rumor mill at recycling conferences, and actually go and find whether the stories are true are not," he said. "I think this report will be good in having the effect of making people question stuff."

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