April 10, 2006 | A parade of trucks piled with worn-out computers and electronic equipment pulls away from container ships docked at the port of Taizhou in the Zhejiang Province of southeastern China. A short distance inland, the trucks dump their loads in what looks like an enormous parking lot. Pools of dark oily liquid seep from under the mounds of junked machinery. The equipment comes mostly from the United States, Europe and Japan.
For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste to China for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal. Since 2000, it's been illegal to import electronic waste into China for this kind of environmentally unsound recycling. But tons of debris are smuggled in with legitimate imports, corruption is common among local officials, and China's appetite for scrap is so enormous that the shipments just keep on coming.
In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.
Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy organization that tracks hazardous waste, filmed these Dickensian scenes in 2004. "The volume of junk was amazing," he says. "It was arriving 24 hours a day and there was so much scrap that one truck was loaded every two minutes." Nothing has changed in two years. "China is still getting the stuff," Puckett tells me in March 2006. In fact, he says, the trend in China now is "to push the ugly stuff out of sight into the rural areas."
The conditions in Taizhou are particularly distressing to Puckett because they underscore what he sees as a persistent failure by the U.S. federal government to stop the dumping of millions of used computers, TVs, cellphones and other electronics in the world's developing regions, including those in China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Because high-tech electronics contain hundreds of materials packed into small spaces, they are difficult and expensive to recycle. Eager to minimize costs and maximize profits, many recyclers ship large quantities of used electronics to countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. U.S. recyclers and watchdog groups like Basel Action Network estimate that 50 percent or more of the United States' used computers, cellphones and TVs sent to recyclers are shipped overseas for recycling to places like Taizhou or Lagos, Nigeria, as permitted by federal law. But much of this obsolete equipment ends up as toxic waste, with hazardous components exposed, burned or allowed to degrade in landfills.
BAN first called widespread attention to the problem in 2002, when it released "Exporting Harm," a documentary that revealed the appalling damage caused by electronic waste in China. In the southern Chinese village of Guiyu, many of the workers who dismantle high-tech electronics live only steps from their jobs. Their children wander over piles of burnt wires and splash in puddles by the banks of rivers that have become dumping grounds for discarded computer parts. The pollution has been so severe that Guiyu's water supply has been undrinkable since the mid-'90s. Water samples taken in 2005 found levels of lead and other metals 400 to 600 times what international standards consider safe.
every piece of hardware not attached to the motherboard (hard drives, cd drives etc) without a case, on wire all hung on one coat hanger. I was trying to minimize the noise cause by vibrations between the hardware and the case. My CPU fan must of sucked some wire up and tangled up the entire setup. It all crashed onto the table, yuck.
Needless to say, I scrapped that hanging setup. I put the hardware back together in its case, and it worked!
Re:Sounds like a bad idea
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 0
I made over $1000 by AllAdvantage. I referred one guy, who was a master spammer or something. I was up to like $30,000 one month, and they realized he was a spammer and took most of his, and my referalls, away.... but I guess they didn't find all of his:D.
Alexandrov didn't explain how his firm would raise the funds, but said one of the reasons he thought such a mission would be profitable was it could involve a "reality" television show.
Episode II
Trump: Igor, your incorrect math has wasted 3 days of valuable research time. This is unacceptable. Put on your spacesuit. You're going to be shot into space. You're fired.
(turns to rest of crew)
Trump: As for the rest of you, enjoy your trip to the very best craters on Mars, the "Trump Craters."
Slashdot Mirror
Does this ruling cover sites selling alcohol, like www.manlaws.com etc?
April 10, 2006 | A parade of trucks piled with worn-out computers and electronic equipment pulls away from container ships docked at the port of Taizhou in the Zhejiang Province of southeastern China. A short distance inland, the trucks dump their loads in what looks like an enormous parking lot. Pools of dark oily liquid seep from under the mounds of junked machinery. The equipment comes mostly from the United States, Europe and Japan.
For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste to China for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal. Since 2000, it's been illegal to import electronic waste into China for this kind of environmentally unsound recycling. But tons of debris are smuggled in with legitimate imports, corruption is common among local officials, and China's appetite for scrap is so enormous that the shipments just keep on coming.
In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.
Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy organization that tracks hazardous waste, filmed these Dickensian scenes in 2004. "The volume of junk was amazing," he says. "It was arriving 24 hours a day and there was so much scrap that one truck was loaded every two minutes." Nothing has changed in two years. "China is still getting the stuff," Puckett tells me in March 2006. In fact, he says, the trend in China now is "to push the ugly stuff out of sight into the rural areas."
The conditions in Taizhou are particularly distressing to Puckett because they underscore what he sees as a persistent failure by the U.S. federal government to stop the dumping of millions of used computers, TVs, cellphones and other electronics in the world's developing regions, including those in China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Because high-tech electronics contain hundreds of materials packed into small spaces, they are difficult and expensive to recycle. Eager to minimize costs and maximize profits, many recyclers ship large quantities of used electronics to countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. U.S. recyclers and watchdog groups like Basel Action Network estimate that 50 percent or more of the United States' used computers, cellphones and TVs sent to recyclers are shipped overseas for recycling to places like Taizhou or Lagos, Nigeria, as permitted by federal law. But much of this obsolete equipment ends up as toxic waste, with hazardous components exposed, burned or allowed to degrade in landfills.
BAN first called widespread attention to the problem in 2002, when it released "Exporting Harm," a documentary that revealed the appalling damage caused by electronic waste in China. In the southern Chinese village of Guiyu, many of the workers who dismantle high-tech electronics live only steps from their jobs. Their children wander over piles of burnt wires and splash in puddles by the banks of rivers that have become dumping grounds for discarded computer parts. The pollution has been so severe that Guiyu's water supply has been undrinkable since the mid-'90s. Water samples taken in 2005 found levels of lead and other metals 400 to 600 times what international standards consider safe.
In the summer of 2005, Puckett investigat
It's actually called the Berkman Center for Internet & Law http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/
Then why are ipods of the same model always the same price, regardless of retailer?
So much folding that it even makes SETI jealous!
every piece of hardware not attached to the motherboard (hard drives, cd drives etc) without a case, on wire all hung on one coat hanger. I was trying to minimize the noise cause by vibrations between the hardware and the case. My CPU fan must of sucked some wire up and tangled up the entire setup. It all crashed onto the table, yuck. Needless to say, I scrapped that hanging setup. I put the hardware back together in its case, and it worked!
AMEN!
I made over $1000 by AllAdvantage. I referred one guy, who was a master spammer or something. I was up to like $30,000 one month, and they realized he was a spammer and took most of his, and my referalls, away.... but I guess they didn't find all of his :D.
Alexandrov didn't explain how his firm would raise the funds, but said one of the reasons he thought such a mission would be profitable was it could involve a "reality" television show. Episode II Trump: Igor, your incorrect math has wasted 3 days of valuable research time. This is unacceptable. Put on your spacesuit. You're going to be shot into space. You're fired. (turns to rest of crew) Trump: As for the rest of you, enjoy your trip to the very best craters on Mars, the "Trump Craters."
This just in: "Google to define a new universal standard of internet measurement, called a G-Unit."
I bet Ron Jeremy has known that for ages! :D