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Unintended Results From U.S. Hardware Dumps In Asia
Izeickl writes: "The BBC has a thought provoking story about old hardware being dumped in parts of Asia. The report 'details a group of villages in south-eastern China where computers from America are picked apart and strewn along rivers and fields.' the article also states 'The report suggested that as much as 80% of the America's electronic waste collected to be recycled is shipped out of the country.'"
It was an anime/manga in which a whole society lived on a planet that was a dump for another society's high tech trash. Enough of the junk worked or partially worked that they were able to make a fairly high tech society themselves; although it was a fairly lawless one. Living off of the trash of others has a psychological impact...
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I've been amassing old computer junk in my closet for years. I'm almost to the point where I was going to pay to have them recycled. But damn, for all I know, I'm probably just paying for shipment to China!
I think there has to be an upcoming business opportunity in recycling this stuff, and doing it in an environmentally responsible manner. I'd almost be willing to start the ball rolling myself. Any resources out there for learning how to do it?
Last I heard from greenpeace about chemical corps just filling up a whole ship with waste barrels and letting it strand on an african shore. It sits there waiting to fall apart andspread it's deadly cargo into the oceans.
Eat more fish they say... contains no mad cow disease... ha !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
CNN has a more detailed article regarding this. China, India and Pakistan are main destination for the rubblish.
The situation is quite frightening. Consequently, the groundwater (near Guiyu, China) is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 18 miles away, the report said.
These "high tech" waste is especially hazardous to these poor workers. Medical waste (eg used bandage) usually smells and look nasty, everyone know they are dirty. Villagers usually have no clue toxic heavy metal will leak to groundwater, burning the plastic will generate very toxic smoke... before too late.
Probably, it is now to add a "prepaid" waste recycling fee to new computers....
Apparently, I was wrong.
These kinds of things really tick me off. I've recycled numerous old systems, in the hopes that they either went to some good, or were safely broken down, to be used in other applications. Instead, they probably just got dumped in a landfill.
I guess I shouldn't be so surprised, these types of things always happen with recycling. Recycled papers sit in warehouses because companies don't frequently buy post-consumer stock. Glass & tires that were originally planned to be melded together to make a new, cheap pavement wind up sitting in their respective piles. Tires that were supposedly going to be used for recreating habitats for aquatic life are instead burned.
And now, all our old 286s are dumping mercury & lead into China. If my old Vendex Headstart 8086 is sitting over there, instead of being recycled, I'll be very, very upset.
Is there anything we can really do to ensure that our equipment doesn't wind up in some other country's landfill??
And the point is ?
Yes I know this is bad for the enviroment, but the simple fact is its not like China is colony of the US and we are forcing th govt to accept the waste, THEY ARE BEING PAID !!!!!
If CHINA chooses NOT to give a shit about its citizens it on them, and THEY should have to answer for it.
This is NOT about the US, get it understand it and live with it.
Now, the people, well thats unfortunate, it really is, BUT IT THEIR GOVERMENTS(CHINA) FAULT !
Wide spread mass industrial pollution with NO regard to the enviroment is seen on both ends, the capatilist and the COMMUNIST side, the latter aswers to noone and it is thus a fair bit worse in general, no dont belive me ? Ask all the people in eastern europe what things were like during USSR rule.
Ok, so you want an alternative use ? Lets drop all this crap out of B52's on Iraq, and all the US enemies, a hell of a lot cheaper than smart bombs, could you imagine what damage a monitor would do falling form 30000 feet ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I was wondering, does this happen in America alone, or does Europe just does thesame thing?
When I see a story like this at CNN (I don't get cable TV -- did anyone see if this was a TV story, or if they only posted it as a webstory?), it kinda makes me think CNN posted it so that some slashmonkey would submit it, their story would get slashdotted, and they'd cash in on the ad revenue.
Anyone agree? Or think this is just silly conspiracy talk?
I keep having this picture of archeologists in thousands of years in the future going through all of this stuff, and trying to piece together an old PC. no tech manuals, etc.
Alot of their success would depend on the level of their own technology, of course.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
1. Practically everything in China is recycled. I've seen old folks / poor people rummage through trashbins with tongs looking for whatever is valuable for picking up some cash. This usually is cans or plastic soda bottles, which usually end up being turned into low-quality polyproplene or such.
2. While the cities I've been to in the last five years have considerably cleaned up their act, China still has an enormous problem with littering. Ever seen the commercials showing the roadside trash from the early 70's in America? That's China nowadays.
3. Many electronic components are desoldered and reused by small mom-and-pop outfits that want to get into business, and don't mind cheaper used components. When you've got lots of people who want to get ahead in life, they will use any resource at their disposal.
i would, and so would a lot of other people. they need to ship them to a stockyard, put them in catalogs and place them on the internet. that would catch, especially if all you have to pay for is shipping for the item you want to buy.. hell, put a 5 item or weight minimum on each order. now that's something alot of the younger generations would visit many times a day religiously just to see what's around--and they would actually be able to afford some things to tinker around with. imagine the amount of drivers and documentation that such an act would surface into the open source community. Allowing the new generation of soft and hard coders to work with some simpler devices would pay off for everyone in the long run. every great coder has to start somewhere..
Also reminds me of something that happened while I was visiting a client in Tokyo.... while riding the high-speed train to the convention center... he pointed to the land surrounding the convention center and said "this used to be ocean... how do you think we got this land?"... I said "I dunno"... He said "every year japaneese throw out old electronics and buy new electronics. We put electronics in bay and build convention center on top.".
Now... I never knew whether or not he was serious - I suspect he was... .but after reading the article - and pondering this... isn't that bad for their environment?
The companies that build these things should be made to set up facilities for getting rid of the products when they are no longer used. This would even apply to industries that produce things other than computers.
:-).
Think about it. GE should be the one to pay for getting rid of CFC's from the refrigerators that they manufacture. This would force them to either raise the price of what they sell, or find a better way to manufacture it (without CFC's for instance).
Computers are built with the knowledge that they will be obsolete in a few years, so it should come as no suprise that if they sell X number of machines in one year, that in 3-4 years that many machines will need to be recycled.
At the very least, a law like this would prevent AOL from producing millions of disks that get thrown into the garbage unopened, or from someone even proposing a throwaway product like DIVX (old DIVX, not new Divx
I cannot believe that this comment is modded as insightful.
1. The people there are too poor that they have to make a little money off your toxic garbage, risking their lives probably without knowing it. Why are you still selling the stuff to them when you know it is going to kill them?
2. Well do you think they know the stuff is toxic or have the proper knowledge of how to dispose of the harzardous material? They are all lowly educated farmers or workers for fsck's sake. If I let a 3-year-old kid drink detergent or whatever, can I still say without guilt something like "Don't complain to someone else because you decide to crap there"?
3. Just because you commit murder in a foreign country where the government is too incompetent to charge you it doesn't mean you are doing something right.
If you fully know your old computer will end up killing some poor people in China or India, why don't you spend a little bit more, probably insignificant to your well being, to save them from being exploited? Or do you think a life in China is not worth your $30?