How China's E-Waste Capital Is Trying To Clean Itself Up

itwbennett writes If you want to see where your old electronics go to die, take a trip to Guiyu. For two decades, PCs, phones and other electronics have been shipped to this town on the southeast coast of China, where locals in thousands of small workshops pull them apart with buzz saws and pliers to extract the valuable components inside. But things may finally be changing. A sign posted by a small stream in the town declares that Guiyu will crack down on any "acid cleaning, and burning activities." And residents said it's rare now to see "board burning" in the town itself, with that and other dangerous activities having been moved to an industrial park to the north.

Comments

pardon my cynicism, but..

[colinjl]

... if there's a sign, and they've relocated the board-burning a few miles, things must be much better.

Re:pardon my cynicism, but..

[linearZ]

It does kind of read like Chinese propaganda.

never mind the "re"

[colinjl]

actually, looking at the article (!), they may want to promote safer cycling, not just recycling

Re:never mind the "re"

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? I see nothing unsafe about his cycling. The main danger for cyclists (motor vehicles) is far away from him.

Shame he has a crappy mountain bike, though, as that won't last too long with everyday use.

Not China, but Africa

[Taco Cowboy]

If you really want to visit the largest e-waste site on Earth you won't find it in China

Because it is in Africa

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Re:Not China, but Africa

[davester666]

China outsourced it there.

Re:Not China, but Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

what's with the anti-china sentiment?

Actually, most of the waste that goes to Africa is from the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste
abcnews.go.com/GMA/Weekend/story?id=8215714

Re:Not China, but Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

America outsourced it there.

Re:Not China, but Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

Source?

Re:Not China, but Africa

[sillybilly]

I live in the US, but if I find old electronics put out in the trash, I can barely resist not stopping and putting it in the trunk. Like a perfectly good 40 inch CRT TV, with vibrant color. Why would you even take that apart. I used to pick apart electronics as a hobby, and even dream about automating things around the home - electronics, such as amateur radio, and sensors, is an awesome thing - to the point of where they give me a job, where the process really needs and begs for automation, - but that's a great way to invite hacking and sabotage on yourself - and whatever automation it has, like digital flow meters, they constantly, constantly, constantly fail on you, or are obviously remote control hacked and display obviously false information, and my best answer there is that you can somewhat rely on your own human biological senses of sight, smell and hearing, a lot more than anything a digital or analog sensor can display to you, including judging flow rates of a solution from mere appearance, knowing it just went from 5 gallons per minute to 7 gallons per minute, not 3.2 like your flow meter says (and the ones fucking with you with incorrect process numbers have not yet realized you realized they are fucking with you), and often you don't have time to fuck with the flow meter and calibrate it or make it work right, also its readings max out at 7 gpm due to friction, and when you visually look at your process flow you might have 9 gallons or even 11 per minute, and that highest sustainable flow that you can get at acceptable quality is everything when it comes to company profit. So I kinda got disenchanted by digital electronics bigtime, and even analog electronics, and have come to know the value and reliability and cheapness of biotech sensors with a brain, such as a plain human being, or a dog with a sense of smell. With biotech, through reproduction, you get a really high tech self reliant piece of equipment that's very hard to beat on price with artificial and dumb and most importantly, unreliable things. But back country counties now have dog license fees, enacted like 2 years ago, which is bullshit, because there is no home security system better than dogs with extreme sense of smell and hearing that nothing else beats in this world (even if they lack color vision, they more than make up for it by smell and hearing), but under expensive licenses they want you to get easily hackable electronic home security systems. If I ever had dogs I'd refuse to register and pay licenses for them. What kind of bullshit is that?

Re:Not China, but Africa

[Anonymous Coward]

holy crap! I turned blue reading that...

Re:Not China, but Africa

[sillybilly]

What kind of thing is having a fee for existence of life, per individual. As in you get a litter of 10 puppies, and you either have to kill or drown 6 of them, else you owe the government money not only for 4, but all 10 of them. Once you get used to licenses per pets, then you move on to livestock, then anything alive, and then come humans - you'll have to purchase a license for each child, payable as a tax to the government - else they exist out of order - and they take over the responsibility for that fee when they turn 18, or signed into adulthood by the parents at 16. The basic existence fee payable to the local powers that be - be it a democratic government or a feudal lord you have o swear fealty to - is gonna be around $9000 per individual per year. Dog licenses. What a fucking joke.

Re:Not China, but Africa

[sillybilly]

Imagine how quickly you'd go bankrupt in a situation like this, simply from the dog license fees: http://lolheaven.com/this-man-...

Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great! Perhaps they could now innovate on low cost, toxic waste processing methods. Perhaps something that could be used in similar site in Africa.

Improved? Or Hyperbolized to Start With?

[retroworks]

1. Guiyu is a used semiconductor / chip harvesting and reuse center. The acid baths stuff (for biproduct after chip reuse) stopped years ago, the material is now shipped to Dowa in Japan. There's an ongoing issue with incineration of the boards to concentrate the metals ash for Dowa - that is the focus of the improvements in the article.

2. Guiyu's main industry is textile dying. The river pollution blamed on "e-waste" is almost identical to Louhajang River in Bangladesh - a textile industry pollution site.

3. Abogbloshie in Ghana is mostly an automobile junkyard. Very little of the "e-waste" there is recently imported. African cities have had TV and recycling for a long time. World Bank statistics show Nigeria had 6.9M households with TV in 2006, for example. India has NO used imports, plenty of informal sector processes.

4. Three separate peer reviewed studies show 85%-91% reuse of used electronics imports in South America and Africa.

5. According to TFA, the material currently processed in Guiyu is mostly generated in China.

6. USA has never been a significant exporter to Africa.

Emerging markets pay $$ for all the shipping. They pay for stuff they want, which is usually reuse value. They also generate "e-waste" and have their own dumps. China and India and Africa generate more electronic junk than USA or Europe. For some decent academic study on the Hoax, here are links to research at Memorial University, MIT, ASU, and UN at this /. story from last December. http://news.slashdot.org/story.... Innocent tinkerers and fixers are getting a firehose of bullshit #FreeHurricaneBenson. It is true that China (and TCL, the largest TV manufacturer in China) have invested in a clean up of Guiyu, and it's true Guiyu was nasty, but there was fortunately not all that much "ewaste" to clean up (worst is incineration of boards to concentrate ash, after chip harvest, prior to export to Dowa). Unfortunately they are not taking on cleanup of the textile industry, so the arsenic in the water samples will remain. Finding arsenic in the Guiyu river should have tipped people off in the first place, it has nothing to do with e-waste and everything to do with textile factories and copper mining.