Editor's Note: Excerpted from Chapter 7, Not in Our Backyard: Exporting Electronic Waste from High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, by Elizabeth Grossman. Copyright ©2006  by Island Press. Excerpted by permission of Island Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

On a sunny afternoon in March 2004, in the darkened conference room of an office in downtown Seattle, Jim Puckett, director of the Basel Action Network, shows his staff video footage he filmed a week or so before in Taizhou, in Zheijiang Province in southern China. The film is unedited, but the images are powerful. One of its sounds still rings in my ears: metal being pounded by hand. It sounds like a blacksmith's shop-an echo of brute force and simple tools that predates the Industrial Revolution. This is not a sound anyone would associate with the wired side of the digital divide. 

The film shows a parade of open trucks piled high with cargo transferred from docked container ships-scrapped electronics sent overseas by richer countries for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling. Computers, printers, office-sized copiers, old transformers, cables, and lighting units are all jumbled up with other less readily identifiable items. The trucks dump their loads on the ground in what looks like an enormous parking lot. We see pools of dark oily liquid seeping out from under mounds of the junked machinery. 

We then see people in backyard workshops pounding metal, banging apart computers, sorting plastics and wires, and tossing bits of what Puckett tells us are copper and aluminum into open basinlike braziers-like big woks-and simple brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Smoke and dust billow out. In smaller outdoor workshops we see chopped-up circuit boards being roasted in uncovered pans to melt away plastics and isolate valuable metals. The scene reminds me of the open-air market restaurants I've visited in China, but instead of pan-fried noodles the fare here is seared semiconductor, replete with lead, brominated flame retardants, and plasticizers. 

We also see dormitories where workers live in tiny rooms only steps from where this electronics dismantling and low-tech smelting takes place. Plastic washbasins sit outdoors on concrete blocks, and laundry hangs within sight of the work areas. The camera zooms in on a barcoded identification tag on the side of a Dell computer sitting out in a yard somewhere in Taizhou. The tag reads: "Property of the Internal Revenue Service." 

"The volume was amazing," Puckett tells me over lunch. "It was arriving twenty-four hours a day, and there was so much scrap that one truck was loaded at the docks every two minutes." Much of this scrap had just arrived from Korea and Japan, and "on any given hour, hundreds of such trucks are moving down the streets of Taizhou," report Puckett and staff members of Greenpeace China who accompanied him on this trip. "We watched the trucks dump the e-waste in yards where former farmers were sitting there with blow torches and chisels, separating the stuff." This kind of used electronics disassembly, Puckett and his colleagues learned from interviews, has increased dramatically in Taizhou over the past couple of years. 

The trip to Taizhou was not Jim Puckett's first encounter with e-waste in China. In 2002, Basel Action Network released a film called Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia. Accompanied by a report, and produced with help from Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Greenpeace China, and others, the film was responsible for the first widely disseminated graphic documentation of what happens to e-waste when it leaves the industrialized West.

I saw Exporting Harm in March 2002, the first time it was shown to an audience of electronics recyclers and high-tech manufacturers. Its pictures of a landscape ruined by high-tech trash and of children picking through the electronic detritus were watched in appalled silence. I've since seen the film screened for other professional audiences, and each time the room falls completely silent. When I've asked U.S. state policy makers what prompted them to take action on e-waste issues, many of them have cited Exporting Harm. No one wants to see their state-or company's- equipment ID tags on electronics lying in slag heaps on a riverbank or being dismantled by a woman whose child sits at her feet while toxic dust flies. The film, said Lauren Roman, who is now executive vice-president of the materials recovery company MaSeR, shortly after the film's premier, "caused a paradigm shift in electronics recycling."

Like the video I saw in Puckett's office, Exporting Harm was shot in southern China-but rather than in Taizhou, it was filmed in Guangdong Province, about half a day's drive north of Hong Kong. Much of the film was shot in and around the village of Guiyu, which had become a major repository for the e-waste that Puckett calls the "effluent of the affluent." Looking at the pictures of burning wires, smoking molten plastics, and workers squatting amid voluminous piles of high-tech scrap, it took no leap of imagination to understand why Puckett describes this scene as the "underbelly of our consumptive cyberage lifestyle."

Exporting Harm showed enormous uncontained sliding mounds of trashed electronics piled throughout Guiyu. The heaps of discarded computer parts-monitors, printers, toner cartridges, keyboards, circuit boards, cell phones, wires, and plastic cases-rose like dunes above a riverbank, their toxic ooze-that contains cadmium, copper, lead, PBDEs, and numerous persistent organic compounds-seeping into and poisoning the local water supply. Junked computer equipment lines one bank of the Lianjiang River as far as the eye can see. Some waste has simply been dumped in the river. So much trash has been left on the riverbank that some people dig old circuit boards out of the riverbed so they can recover the metal embedded within.

In the mid-1990s not long after e-waste began arriving, the groundwater in Guiyu and neighboring villages became undrinkable. The entire village must now have its drinking water trucked in because local supplies have been fouled by high-tech trash. But given the expense of buying potable water, residents still wash dishes in contaminated groundwater. Children still play and swim in the toxic river water. River fish supply food for the local community. Water samples taken from the Lianjiang River in 2000 showed levels of lead 2,400 times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization (WHO). Samples taken by Basel Action Network in 2001 from the same location contained lead levels 190 times higher than WHO safety standards. By the late 1990s, according to a report prepared by Greenpeace China and Sun Yat-sen University's anthropology department, Guiyu had become "the largest and most concentrated site of electronic waste trade in China."

Because proper disposal and recycling of obsolete electronics is difficult, labor intensive, and therefore expensive, and because communities throughout the developed world have said, "Don't dump it here," large quantities of this waste are shipped overseas to developing countries where labor is so cheap and environmental laws are often lax. For years-probably beginning in the late 1980s-huge containers of old computer equipment have been shipped out of the United States, Japan, Korea, the European Union, and other developed nations and sent to less wealthy countries by recyclers who are actually brokers or dealers in e-waste. In addition to China, this waste has been going to many other countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Nigeria.

Further Reading:

• Africa: Next in Line to Get Trashed
• E-Good
• Turning the Tide on E-Waste
• The Dark Side of Recycling
• Computers - is there a Greener Way?