US dumps computer waste on third world

TOXIC OLD COMPUTERS are being dumped on the third world where poor labourers risk their heath to process and recycle the parts, environmentalists report.

Discarded computers are shipped from the United States to China Pakistan and India, the report entitled "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia," states. The report was prepared by two organizations -- Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) - with support from Toxics Link India, Greenpeace China and SCOPE (Pakistan).

Their investigations uncovered an entire area known as Guiyu in Guangdong Province, surrounding the Lianjiang River northeast of Hong Kong where about 100,000 poor migrant workers are employed breaking apart and processing obsolete computers imported primarily from North America.

There, men, women and children toil "under primitive conditions, often unaware of the health and environmental hazards involved in operations which include open burning of plastics and wires, riverbank acid works to extract gold, melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of toxic lead laden cathode ray tubes," says the report.

Investigators said tons of the "E-waste" were dumped along rivers, in open fields and irrigation canals in the rice-growing area. Pollution in the ares has become so devastating that well water is no longer drinkable and water for the entire population. has to be trucked in from 30 kilometers away.

"We found a cyber-age nightmare," said Jim Puckett, coordinator of BAN. “They call this recycling, but it's really dumping by another name. Yet to our horror, we further discovered that rather than banning it, the United States government is actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the US daily."

BAN says the United States is the only developed country in the world that has failed to ratify the Basel Convention - a United Nations environmental treaty which has adopted a global ban on the export of hazardous wastes from the world's most developed countries to developing countries. The US has exempted toxic E-waste from its own laws governing exports, claiming material was destined for recycling.

"Consumers in the U.S. have been the principal beneficiaries of the high-tech revolution and we simply can't allow the resulting high environmental price to be pushed off onto others," said Ted Smith, Executive Director of SVTC. "Rather than sweeping our E-waste crisis out the backdoor by exporting it to the poor of the world, we have got to address it square in the face and solve it at home, in this country, at its manufacturing source." µ