Photo journalist Jeroen Bouman gets a rare glimpse inside the illegal Chinese workshops where young teenagers work long hours amid noxious fumes, recycling computers from the US and Europe. The industry has turned four villages in Guiyu, Guangdong province, into toxic waste tips. Drinking water is now brought by lorries from 30 kilometres away.
Large trucks bring containers of hard drives, monitors, servers and other hi-tech cast-offs. Workers break them up, salvage what they can sell and leave the rest on the streets for others to pick through. A crackdown by the Chinese authorities earlier this year closed some of the workshops. I posed as a student to visit the remaining ones. Some owners were very aggressive others invited me in for tea. These workers are sorting plastic by heating it with a cigarette lighter and sniffing the fumes. They complained of headaches.
A young girl covers her mouth against the stench as she runs past a pile of recently processed circuit boards. The mountains of e-waste are laced with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. According to the Basel Action Network, a pile of 500 computers contains 717kg of lead, 1.36kg of cadmium, 863 grams of chromium and 287 grams of mercury all poisonous metals. I saw computers with American and European labels in the workshops I visited.
Two boys aged about 13 dip used computer chips into foul-smelling solder - a mixture of lead and tin - to make them look new. I also saw a boy aged about 14, with no respiratory protection, dusting the ink out of an old toner cartridge with an ordinary paintbrush. Toner ink is classed as a possible human carcinogen. Investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) in the region have seen villagers burning the coating off cables in open fires certain plastics are known to release highly toxic dioxins and furans when burnt. Workers with no respiratory protection were also seen swirling computer chips in huge baths of steaming acid to recover tiny amounts of gold.
Girls aged between 17 and 19 sort computer chips. There are about 50 workshops in each village, each employing between 12 and 20 people although the Chinese press has estimated the number of people employed in the sector to be as high as 100,000. The people I met worked nine hours a day, six days a week and would have had a couple of years of elementary education at most. The BAN investigators said the typical wage was about US$1.50 a day. They photographed small children sorting plastic chippings into different colours.
A cathode ray tube sits by what was previously a drainage ditch. It has now been filled with crushed glass from computer monitors. The glass contains lead oxide, to protect users from potentially harmful X-rays, and is classed as a hazardous waste under the international Basel Convention. Single samples taken by the BAN researchers in the region tested 190 times the World Health Organisations safe level for lead, had chromium levels 1338 times the level deemed safe in the US and tin levels 152 times the US threshold. For money, people have made a mess of this good farming village
Every day villagers inhale this dirty air; their bodies have become weak. Many people have developed respiratory and skin problems. Some people wash vegetables and dishes with the polluted water, and they get stomach sickness, a 60 year-old resident of the region told them.
The Chinese authorities have clamped down on the e-waste recycling industry in the region, but there were still lots of workshops operating and it is possible that there are other similar areas which have not yet come to light. There is little other employment in Guiyu and villagers are faced with a stark choice - continue working illegally, poisoning their land and damaging their health or try to scratch out another livelihood in their polluted village.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/st...002/disposable_planet/waste/chinese_workshop/
