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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.'"
"picked apart and strewn along rivers and fields."
What are they trying to do....grow more computers?
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
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?
This reminds me of a report a few years back that found that most paper being put into recycling bins actually wound up being stockpiled in warehouses because companies weren't buying enough post-consumer paper. Same thing was happening in Austria. It kinda made me a bit cynical about the whole environmental issue. (I still recycle most of the stuff I can, but I always get skeptical whenever a new 'study' comes out on the benefits of recycled materials.)
:-/
But I digress... so, in PA, we're not allowed to throw out computers. We have to take them to recycling centers... well, technically. I still think most people just toss the machines. For the reason that toxic metals will leech into the ground and pollute the water. What a shame that we're shipping all our crap to other countries to pollute.
Humorless sig goes here.
It is only thought provoking if you are like most americans that have never travelled outside the US to see these kinds of things first hand. It actually says more about your lack of awarness than it does about any sort of industrial posture. Russia dumps subs off Japan and Korea. Britain dumps medical waste off the coast of Sri Lanka...Australia dumps scrap metal into the South polar seas...New York City dumps commercial waste into the Atlantic. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's new or newsworthy. Get outside and take a look for yourself. Visit India and the Balkans and the South Seas and Asia. Waste has a meaning you obviously missed during history class.
I think two points are worth noting - firstly, for better or worse, the source of the report and its tone are set firmly within the environmentalist camp.
Secondly - this problem is probably the tip of the iceberg, and is certainly a very real threat to the environment in the next few decades. I personally believe we should take significant action now to prevent the need for another Kyoto (where this would be a serious issue) ten years from now.
I know around these parts (Eastern MA), I just can't get rid of the stuff. It piles up in closets, clutters up counters, sits in heaps in the corners. Old monitors my eyes can no longer tolerate, strange boards with bus interfaces I can no longer use, old hardrives too small to bother with. Its illegal to put in the trash, and even the "hasardous waste" pickup wont take monitors anymore. As more and more "average" people upgrade old computers, the problem will only get worse. Already I see "dumping" of old eletronics at the goodwill drop sites in the middle of the nights. I don't know what they do with the stuff, since it probably can't easily be sold or scrapped. Electronic waste will be a serious problem in the near future, and not just for our poorer friends in China.
}#q NO CARRIER
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??
sPh
Toxic garbage has to be dealt and everybody knows that the cheapest solution always comes first... The transfer of hazardous waste is restricted by a 1989 treaty known as the Basel Convention, but the United States has not ratified it. why am I not suprised??
Migx
How is my problem if people in other countries, far, far away, don't care as much about "preserving their scenic countryside" as they do about eating?
When other people are doing things which we know are harmful to them and their environment we have a responsibility to try and help deter this act. However, so does their government. Their government elected (or not) by their people has the primary responsibility in looking after its own people. Our responsibilities are secondary. We (the US) are not God, we are not the world's baby sitter, we are not ultimately responsible for every other governments ineptitude and disregard for its own people. With that in mind I think a small recycling tax pre-paid for every computer part should be charged. In exchange a convenient and local outlet for recycling should be provided. I don't wanna have to pay $30 to recycle my 286. Thats bullshit. I'll just chunk it in the garbage first if thats the case. I know, I'm a pompus jackass for doing so, but I bet nine times outta ten thats what you do too.. so :P
Anyway, I guess thats the problem in the United States. Everyone is saying recycle, recycle, but no one (except maybe Cali or Oregon) gives you convenient resources to actually do it. If I wanna recycle my plastic I have to drive to some distanct Wal-Mart with a trunk full of trash to do so.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
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"
" Convinced that States should take necessary measures to ensure that the management of hazardous wastes and other wastes including their transboundary movement and disposal is consistent with the protection of human health and the environment whatever the place of disposal. "
So it seems that the convention exists, but the US is flatly rejecting accepting it. But I imagine that came as no shock to anyone, as it's not benefitting the US in any way whatsoever, and so is not important. How many times do we need to see the US exploiting the needs of other countries to save a few bucks before we demand that it stops? The US can't run around the world, butting in to conflicts and acting like some sort of benevolent super-sentient being, when during its time off from being a global-cop it likes to dump mercury in Asia. That's just hypocrisy like we've never seen before. USA! USA!
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.
What's worse about this case is we know that the Chinese government will not dispose of this responsibly, but instead leave the stuff to poison their own people. Yet we still keep sending it to them. Can there be any other explanation other than that we just don't care about those people? It does not make it any more moral when some American idiot like you (correctly) observes that their own government doesn't care about them either. Hell, let's sell S. Hussein some biowaste so he could poison those annoying rebels. Hell, once he hands us the check, it's out of our hands, right?
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..
1. We are not forcing this old hardware on anyone. If it's ending up in China or India it's because the people there think they can make some money off of it.
2. Even if they CAN make some money off of it, it's not our fault they throw the exploited "recycled" hardware in rivers. Come on. Crap in your refrigerator and it's going to have some negative affects on your food. Don't complain to someone else because you decided to crap there.
3. If the Chinese government sees this as a problem they should not let the stuff be imported. If it's being imported illegally the Chinese government should have no problem prosecuting (i.e., executing) the offending party.
Do I want my old computer ending up in a river? No. But don't blame me if it does, *I* didn't throw it in a river or asked anyone to burn plastic off its wires...
There are too many other responsible parties here that are DIRECTLY responsible to come after me with some tax or $30 increase on PC sales to try to resolve the problem. You want to solve the problem? Have China ban the practice. If China doesn't see it as a problem then why the hell should we?
Come on, I'm sick of this environmental psycho-babble.
If the US can export hazardous waste to these countries, how is that any different from Colombia sending drugs to the US?
It may sound like twisted logic at first, but think about it.
Country A produces a product that it ships to country B. This product is used by the poor in country B to make some money, but in the process they end up hurting their own communities. Not only that, this product spreads, causing harm in more affluent communities living further away.
Replace "A" with Colombia and "product" with drugs and you have the current drug war.
Or, replace "A" with US, "product" with toxic waste, and you have the current toxic waste dumping scenario.
Think about it.
Instead of charging someone X number of dollars for the cost of recycling, they should charge X*2 number of dollars and then PAY each person who brings in a computer X number of dollars.
That way people would have an incentive to do the right thing instead of just dumping it someplace and the program would pay for itself due to inflation and the fact that not EVERYONE is going to recycle, even if it pays.
As for the inflation angle, it works like this. If someone pays you X number of dollars and Y number of years later you pay them back the same exact ammount of money, well then you're actually paying them X/(inflation_rate^Y) in real dollars. This is why you almost NEVER see interest free loans, the lenders lose money on them. In the case of computers, the lifespan is short enough that the devaluation of the money from inflation would not be so great as to reduce it to nothing.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
To me, this seems like the right way to go, provided that the companies don't just ship the product out of country where it becomes someone else's problem.
If we force manufacturers to charge for the full cost of technology, instead of subsidizing them as tax-payers, then they will tend to develop interesting ways to reduce the cost of recycling. This also lets consumers integrate the price of disposal into the purchasing decision, rewarding companies that have cleaner products.
However, if you want that way 31337 toaster with embedded, overclocked, uranium cooled processor, then you are welcome to it -- provided that you pay for the full cost, including its safe recycling.
The old 360 was crated up, and sent to Altanta GA, from there it was to put aboard a ship (Savannah?) and sent to Hong Kong, where I was told families bid on parts of the system. The families would take home their share and, like a cottage industry, strip it down to it the various recycleable parts. (I was told the 360 had a significant amount of gold in it.) From there the valuable amount would be sold, no mention of what became of the remainder. This would appear to be where it went, tossed into a river, rather than the families paying someone else to cart away what they couldn't sell.
So rather than blaming the US, in general, you might want to start by considering the people who buy these things and toss the remnants, or the middlemen who make a living carting it there to auction off to them. Taiwan, as I've heard, has a serious problem with metals in their water, from industrial production and probably lack of a well organised, legal and ethical means of disposal. Even dumping old capacitors in the sea could return PVP's and other compounds in fish and shellfish, which many of these communities depend upon heavily.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's why we create international treaties for these problems, that every countries ratify (except the US when the obligation would cost money to US companies).
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.
(A.P. News 25,237 CE)
Archeologists have made a great advance towards understanding the contents of fossilised "hard disks" with the discovery of what they are calling the "Pornsetta Stone"...
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Not so very many years ago (~10), I was traveling around a country usually derided as "Third World."
One day, in a major city, I was walking near the river, and came across a small road where dozens of older men were squatting with old circuit boards and soldering irons. They would unsolder resisters, capacitors, etc, and place them into bins according to the kind of component.
A few streets further down, I came across another group of old men. These guys were pulling apart what looked like damaged automobile transmissions. One set of guys unscrewed, decoupled, and removed pieces, one set of guys cleaned the grease off of them, one set of guys sorted the parts (gears, synchros, etc) according to their size and level of damage.
It really got me thinking. Here in the States, you don't even think of repairing broken consumer electronic stuff -- it's cheaper to get a new one, and it'll probably have more features. There, the labor costs are virtually nil in comparison to the cost of the materials.
It made me think that there was a valuable process at work. Our garbage was recycled, and it actually benefits someone. Now, it is clear that this is an artifact of an unfair, unjust system. Obviously, fixing the overall system would be better. But within the context of the way things currently are, it's a reasonably good thing.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Interesting read. I am from India (now in the US).I did not know about the Alang shipbreaking yard from back home. It's really sad to see this kind of exploitation. Instead of blaming the west and the developed world for this mess totally, we must really look at the connivance of the "brown" man as well. This was possible only because the government of India, Indian businesses (who own the yards) "co-operated" and of course these guys are all Indians. All this is because of the lure of "greenbacks" offered by the developed nations. This is a case of man exploiting man. Forget about "neo-colonization" and other big words, it's the worst case of exploitation one comes across in which people of the same race,ethnicity are involved, in other words not "white" expoiting "brown" but "brown" exploiting "brown" and preventing their own kind from succeeding(in any sphere of life). This phenomenon is observed mostly in India, which is the reason why Indians dont prosper at home, when they go abroad they do ! In the end who really cares about those 40,000 people at the ship breaking yard ? No one really.