Chinese town where old presents go to die
Richard Spencer, Telegraph 27 Dec 07;
The Chinese town of Guiyu is the graveyard of Christmas past.
It is where presents - game consoles, laptops, mobile phones - come to die.
It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, melted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.
Now the British Environmental Agency says that despite a ban on exports of electronic waste to China, unscrupulous middle men are using a loophole in the law intended to encourage recycling to dump more goods in places like Guiyu, where labour costs are low and environmental controls weak.
E-waste is delivered to "civic amenity sites", which can sell it on for recycling at home.
"Operators are visited by what we would call waste tourists," said John Burns, the Environmental Agency enforcement manager.
"They will buy in bulk and ship it abroad ostensibly as second-hand goods for resale but in fact for breaking up."
The effects, particularly of breaking up circuit boards, are clear within minutes of arriving in Guiyu, a town five hours' drive north-east of Hong Kong.
The smell of scorched metal and burned plastic hangs over the town.
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The source is immediately obvious. Inside and outside the shack-like workshops that line the streets, men and women sit burning circuit boards over coal fires. Wang Qing, a 39-year-old mother of two, sits for 10 or 12 hours a day, 30 days a month, over the flame, melting the solder that sticks the electronic components to the circuit boards.
With a knife, she scrapes them into baskets on one side and dumps the singed boards on the other. A thick cloud of toxic smoke envelopes her face.
"I get head-aches all the time, and suffer a lot of colds," she said. She said she didn't like to wear face-masks and her boss did not insist.
Her wages drew her a thousand miles from her home in central China. She earns about £100 a month, a decent salary in China. In other workshops, many family-run, children help out during their lunch breaks and holidays.
In the streets, piles of scrap mount up, while effluent fills the black streams that criss-cross the town and in which residents still rely for daily tasks such as washing. Much of this comes from the acid baths in which components are washed either to remove surplus metal, or to break them down further.
The price of metals found in the components, including gold and copper, has risen hugely in recent years, meaning good profits can be had from extracting them.
But according to local academics, the families, while making money, are also paying a frightening price. A study at nearby Shantou University found that of 165 children aged between one and six in Guiyu, 135 - 82 per cent - had clinical lead poisoning, which can cause brain damage.
The problem is not new. The Daily Telegraph first visited Guiyu seven years ago, and since then the European Union has banned exports of E-waste.
But alongside the familiar brand-names, such as ATI and Intel, The Daily Telegraph found evidence of the continuing trade, which is also supposed to be banned by China itself.
Labels showed bundles had been sent from EU countries such as Austria as well as from America, where, despite campaigns, the trade is still legal.
Hong Kong's environmental protection department said that the city had so far this year stopped 116 container loads of electronic waste being illegally imported, up from 70 all last year, though none was from Britain.
That does not mean the trade is not happening. Britain prosecuted two companies this year caught trying to export electric waste illegally. One was fined just £3,000, another £9,000.
Guiyu is not China's only recycling city. Further south is Panyu, which specialises in plastic bags.
Further north is Taizhou, which takes plastic bottles, and melts them down into pellets.
And Guiyu has branched out into other products too. Outside one warehouse were piles of bits of cars. "We specialise in Audis and Land Rover," the owner said.
Even the biggest Christmas presents end up in Guiyu.
