The pungent stench of e-waste

By: Mari-Len De Guzman - IT World Canada (19 Aug 2005)

Something's cooking in a forgotten corner of the province of Zheijiang, China — and it's the perfect recipe for a health and environmental disaster. Ingredients of this toxic swill include assorted electronic circuit boards simmered in pure nitric and hydrochloric acids.

For a meagre $1.50 a day, labourers in the province's Taizhou region heat computer circuit boards in order to extract and recover valuable metals within the products for reuse. The process is done outdoors, by hand, and releases lethal toxic fumes.

The same process can be observed in the town of Giuyu in Guangdong province. What used to be a simple, farming community has been transformed into a low-tech e-waste recycling operation that - through manual labour - recovers components and reusable material from obsolete computer and other electronic equipment. A Guiyu child sits on a pile of e-waste

Nearby, someone is dismantling toner cartridges with his or her bare hands, without wearing any respiratory protection. Young children sort copper wires to remove reusable material — again with their bare hands. Women melt electronic microchips over coal-fired, shallow, wok-like grills containing molten lead-tin solder, sometimes aided by electric fans that blow away the toxic stench.

At night, leftover parts, including wires, plastic computer casings, discarded circuit boards and glass from monitors, are burned into a mountain of toxic ash. Most of it ends up in the town’s river, which in the span of only five years has been transformed from a safe source of drinking water into a stream of black poison.

SCRAP HEAP

Despite being both hazardous and illegal, this is a familiar electronic recycling process that’s all too common in China and other Asian countries like India and Pakistan. And it’s where most old computers from Canada end up as a result of being sold as scrap to so-called e-waste "recyclers."

The United States is the only industrialized nation that has not ratified the Basel Convention.

In fact, e-waste from industrialized nations typically ends up being exported to poor and/or developing countries. Some estimates suggest between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of electronic waste ends up somewhere in Asia.

Most of the e-waste processed in Guiyu bears a label suggesting North American origin, according to a report published by Seattle-based Basel Action Network (BAN). BAN is a global watchdog seeking worldwide prohibition of e-waste export to third-world countries.

Under the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal — an international treaty of 134 signatory countries — it is illegal to export e-waste to countries that have imposed an import ban.

In April 2000, the Chinese government banned the import of certain types of e-waste, including monitors, telephones and computers. Despite the ban, however, container loads of old electronic and computer equipment still manages to make its way into Chinese ports, ending up in recycling facilities such as those in Giuyu and Taizhou, according to BAN.

Canada's e-waste:

13.8 million new computers will be sold in Canada between 2005 and 2010
With current efforts, only less than 3 million will be re-used, stored or recycled responsibly
In 2002, 157,000 tonnes of e-waste were disposed, of which only 9,000 tonnes were recycled

A subsequent amendment to the treaty, passed in 1994, imposes a ban on the export of hazardous waste from member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union(EU) to non-OECD and non-EU countries. The amendment essentially prohibits rich countries from dumping their e-waste to poorer nations that have neither the technological nor financial means to manage e-waste processing in an environmentally friendly way.

While Canada was among those countries that signed the 1989 Convention, it did not sign the subsequent 1994 Amendment. The United States is the only industrialized nation that has not ratified the Basel Convention.

BAN estimates that between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of e-waste collected for recycling in the U.S. ends up in container ships bound for Asia. Ninety per cent of that material will likely go to China. Ironically, this e-waste is likely shipped back to Asia on the very ships that may have transported new electronic equipment from Asia to North America.