Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
components to the motherboard, sorted the components into sacks, and sent the cleaned
motherboards off to have their gold extracted.
Theirs was one of thousands of similar workshops in town. Guiyu's entire economy
is based on tearing apart old electronics and reselling the components and raw materials.
Walk the streets and you will see building after building with a workshop at ground level
and family quarters on the upper floors.
It's a dirty business. Computers are full of all kinds of things that are bad for
you—things other than the Internet—and when you tear them apart, or melt them down,
or saw them into pieces, a portion of those toxic substances is released. In a place like
Guiyu, with what I'll call relaxed workplace standards, you end up with workshops full of
lead dust and other heavy metals and clouds of who the hell knows what floating through
the streets. The water is laced with PCBs and PBDEs and other hazardous acronyms. The
air, the water, the dust—in Guiyu it comes with promises of cancer, nerve damage, and
poisoned childhood development.
Exporting toxic waste across borders, especially to developing countries, is supposed
to be illegal. The Basel Convention, the treaty that outlaws it, was already nearly twenty
years old by the time I visited Guiyu, in 2011. In the case of electronic waste, though, the
convention is easy to circumvent. As the green-electronics coordinator at the ever-present
Greenpeace has said, “the common way exporters get round existing regulations is to rela-
bel e-waste as second-hand goods for recycling.”
Of course, it
is
recycling. Which is another thing, along with the town's curiously ag-
ricultural character, that complicates any appreciation of a place like Guiyu. But whether
you consider it a toxic hellhole or a paragon of recycling and resourcefulness, the rivers of
junked electronics flow in.
That it makes economic sense to ship the stuff halfway around the world for recycling
is explained first by the low cost of labor here. But you must also consider the volume of
empty shipping containers returning to China. Incredible amounts of manufactured goods
are sent from China to the West in shipping containers, and since the conveyor belt must
run both ways, sending freight back is cheap. The result is that we don't really buy our
electronics from China after all. We just rent them and then send them back to be torn apart.
India and certain African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, also get in on the
game, but China is the e-waste importer par excellence, and Guiyu is the industry's crown
jewel. Guiyu is so famous for its commitment to electronic waste that it has become a
mecca for journalists interested in the topic—which some people here don't like. In 2008,
a crew from
60 Minutes
was attacked while filming a television report in Guiyu. Shady
business-people don't want their dangerous, quasi-legal industry exposed. But maybe there
was an element of local pride as well. If my town were world famous as a warren of poison-
