Chinese towns poisoned by U.S. high-tech trash

Martin Fackler

Friday, March 1, 2002 | 10:01 a.m.

GUIYU, China -- Chen Wu was glad when his village became a dumping ground for discarded computer hardware from the United States.

Salvaging computer parts meant jobs for this rural area of China's southeast -- even if it did poison the drinking water and create an unsightly landscape of broken circuit boards and hard drives.

But Chen's attitude changed two years ago when his 11-year-old daughter grew weak, suffered nose bleeds and was diagnosed with leukemia. Two of her classmates were stricken by the same illness.

Teachers say more than half the students complain of chronic breathing problems.

"We did not care much when outsiders talked about the environmental pollution here. We did not see any harm," said Chen, 50, who works at a drug rehabilitation center. "But now our kids are getting sick."

Environmental groups consider Guiyu, a cluster of five villages in Guangdong province about 150 miles northeast of Hong Kong, a cautionary tale for poor countries that accept high-tech waste.

Over the last decade, these groups say, as much as 80 percent of the old computers, monitors and printers collected for "recycling" in the United States wound up in China, India and Pakistan, according to a report released Monday by environmental groups, documenting the flood of e-waste to the southeaster Chinese villages.

Most of the e-trash, which environmentalists say comes mostly from brokers and recyclers who collect old equipment from larger U.S. businesses, ends up in Guangdong, in Guiyu and other towns.

There, workers rip through the waste -- trashed hardware bearing brand names including Compaq, Apple and IBM -- looking for every reusable part. Some components are melted to extract precious metals such as gold and platinum.

What's left -- from sophisticated flat screens to low-grade plastics -- is burned or dumped beside Guiyu's rice paddies and waterways.

Toxic chemicals such as mercury, lead and dioxins are released into the air and water.

The first sign of danger in Guiyu came when fish disappeared from a local river in the early 1990s, not long after the first truckloads of foreign computer waste rolled in.

Chemicals poisoned the wells, so drinking water must now be trucked in.

The odor of burning plastic is so strong that classes at the nearby Dongyuan Middle School must sometimes be halted.

One teacher, who gave only his last name, Guo, said about 60 percent of students and even many teachers cough and have trouble breathing.

"The villagers here are growing richer," he said, "but their wealth is built atop the health of other victims."

This year alone, the United States will export as many as 10.2 million discarded computers to Asia, including about 9 million to China, the environmental groups' report said.

It's hard to tell how much of it will end up in Guiyu, where the local economy has come to depend on computer garbage despite China's 1996 banning of computers and monitors as waste.

Environmental authorities in Shantou, a city with jurisdiction over Guiyu, say they have launched five crackdowns over the last two years, shutting down hundreds of computer waste operations.

But most of these quickly reopened, they concede, often with the help of village officials. The Beijing government has weak control in Guangdong, a region where organized criminal gangs are strong.

Environmentalists estimate the region now has some 2,500 computer waste businesses, mostly family-run. The industry may employ as many as 100,000 people, many of them migrants from elsewhere in China.