Guiyu, in Guangdong Province, Southern China, is made up of four small villages. It is the location of what may be the largest electronic waste site on earth. This niche industry employs tens of thousands of people, many of them in small, family-run workshops. Piles of discarded computer monitors sit scattered along the roadsides. All day long e-waste loaded trucks arrive in town, Workers dismantle and heat circuit boards on a steel surface to remove the computer chips soldered into it. Once the individual components have become hot, they can replace easily. Fans should channel this most existing highly toxic vapors, outside. The Circuit boards contain tiny amounts of gold and silver. After 'cooking' the boards are treated with acid baths.
Greenpeace reports say 80 percent of Guiyu's children suffer from respiratory disease, and a report from Shantou University said Guiyu has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world and an elevated rate of miscarriages.
Furthermore, once equipment has been imported into Hong Kong, it can then shipped to another country, including mainland China, for direct re-use, with no waste import/export permit required. From 2007 to 2010, 360 illegal containers of hazardous waste were intercepted by Hong Kong customs. Most of the shipments were e-waste from the US, Canada, Japan and EU countries intended for China.
Transboundary shipments
India is one of the largest waste importing countries in
the world. All types of wastes are imported into the country in the form of cheap raw materials including hazardous and toxic wastes. Although, India domestically generated an enormous amount of e-waste itself, India imports million tons every year. Due to a lack of data the e-waste issue is hard to grasp especially in India. Experts say necessary checks and balances are missing. Waste has become a serious business in the country, worth billions, dominated by the so-called informal sector, where tens of thousands of people are estimated to make their living from material recovery i.e. within small units with low-skilled, mainly migrant labour. Home-based recyclers burn wires and integrated chips over small flames to get at the copper and other metal inside, inhaling toxic fumes in the process.
Recycling electronics is very complex. A mobile phone will be made up of 40 to 60 different elements. Gold is one of those valuable elements, but the informal recycling commonly done in China and India nets only 20 percent of that gold. The new set of rules (Ministry of Environment and Forest) propose to move this recycling to the formal sector. But it seems to be a long way to go.