Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
they are discarded? This electronic, or 'e-waste', is often shipped to urban areas and rural
villages across Asia, Africa and Latin America for disassembly or dumping.
The practice of sending obsolete electronics abroad creates a massive transfer of haz-
ardous waste products from rich nations to nations of the global South, and is responsi-
ble for impacting public health and the integrity of watersheds in countries such as
Bangladesh, Brazil, India, the Philippines and Taiwan.
An estimated 80 percent of computer waste collected for recycling in the USA is
exported to Asia, where it is generally dumped and recycled under very hazardous con-
ditions.
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Environmental activists have called this practice 'toxic colonialism' and a form
of 'global environmental injustice'.
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Jim Puckett directs the Seattle-based Basel Action
Network (BAN) - an NGO - and argues that the global trade in e-waste is a problematic
business that 'leaves the poorer peoples of the world with an untenable choice between
poverty and poison'.
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E-waste in Asia: China and India
In 2002, the Basel Action Network (BAN), the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (another
NGO) and several partners in Asia released a report and video that documented the
growing international trade in toxic electronic waste from the USA to China, India,
Pakistan and other Asian nations.
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After months of strategizing with social advocacy
groups to gain access to sensitive sites and interview workers in China, Pakistan and
India, they completed and released the report, which sent shock waves through the elec-
tronics industry and was picked up by nearly every major media outlet in North America,
Europe and Asia. The report and video centered on the way that computer monitors,
circuit boards and other electronic equipment collected in the USA - sometimes under
the guise of 'recycling' - are regularly sold for export to Asia, where the products are
handled under hazardous conditions, creating tremendous environmental and human
health risks. The report found that workers - including children - use their bare hands,
hammers, propane torches and open acid baths to recover gold, copper, lead and other
valuable materials. What is unused is dumped in waterways,
elds and open trenches, or
simply burned in the open air.
Exporting Harm
mainly focused on the situation in China,
while acknowledging that the e-waste trade also heavily impacts many other parts of the
world.
Like China, India has also embarked on a major modernization project. One of the
primary paths to achieving this goal is through the embrace of information technology.
But environmentalists and occupational health advocates are concerned that the Indian
government's priority of increasing computer density among the population will ulti-
mately contribute to the waste problem. As in the case of China's imports of e-waste from
the USA, in India brutal global economics plays a major role. Recycling a computer in
the USA costs about $20, but the same product can be sold in New Delhi for a mere $4.
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E-waste recycling also creates dangerous working conditions for those involved in disas-
sembling these goods. Ravi Agarwal, an activist with Toxics Link India, worries about the
health impacts of exposure to plastics, for example:
fi
When you actually physically break them [computers] down, which involves burning, putting
them in acid baths, these very low end, basic, labor intensive breaking practices, then people
breaking them get high degrees of exposure, (that are) totally unacceptable in most parts of the
world.
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