Before farmer Tai Chunhua walked away from the fields of China's Jiangxi Province and headed south for Guiyu town in Guangdong, he hadn't seen a computer in his 21 years. Three years later his working day sees him surrounded by the hi-tech gadgetry of Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Toshiba, Hitachi, Apple, Compaq, Epson, Xerox ... the issue of just about every big-name manufacturer of electronic office equipment on the planet.
Dressed in a black cotton shirt, healthily tanned and with neatly cut hair, Tai is a specialist in the office-equipment game. His field of expertise is toner cartridges for printers and photocopier machines. He doesn't design the cartridges. He doesn't sell them or even install them. He smashes them to bits to salvage tiny amounts of residual toner. For this dirty, polluting task he might make RMB20 (HK$18) a day. For his troubles he might also be rewarded with respiratory and skin diseases, eye infections, even cancer.
According to a report by Seattle-based environmental group the Basel Action Network (BAN), and a Californian watchdog called the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Guiyu is no glittering El Dorado; rather, it is a stinking, polluted graveyard for obsolete and broken computer equipment: 'e-waste', imported as scrap primarily from the United States, but also originating in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Europe. Titled Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, the report documents a man-made disaster.
Every year Guiyu takes in more than a million tonnes of computer waste, earning its residents, according to mainland press reports, RMB1 billion. All day, every day, mountains of wire and other equipment are burned in Guiyu's streets to obtain copper and other scrap metals. Printed circuit boards are heated over charcoal burners to liberate them of computer chips that might be reusable. The boards are then soaked in acid to extract gold, and the waste dumped alongside or in the nearby Lianjiang River. Printer cartridges are ripped apart for their toner and recyclable aluminium, steel and plastic parts. Cathode-ray tubes are hammered open for their copper yokes.
The result is that the air, land and water on which local people depend have all been poisoned. Local well water is already undrinkable, even after boiling, and fresh supplies must be trucked in from the town of Chan Dim 15 kilometres away. According to the report: 'It is extremely likely that due to the presence of PVC or brominated flame retardants in wire insulation, the emissions and ashes from such burning will contain high levels of both brominated and chlorinated dioxins and furans - two of the most deadly persistent organic pollutants. It is also highly likely that cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are present in the emissions and ash.'
'Compared to the rest of China, this place has more miscarriages,' says Doctor Li Fai-ping, who works in the maternity ward at the local Chao Yang Yiu Fai Hospital. 'Babies simply die in the wombs. There are several cases a month.' She adds that the Government has done nothing to assess the damage being done by the e-waste industry. 'No scientists have come here to test the effects [of the pollution on the community]. We are sent to work here, we are scared too.' 'The fact that nobody knows of the dangers is the most depressing thing,' says BAN researcher Jim Puckett, co-author of the report.
'I don't care whether this work is harmful or not,' says Tai, cracking open another cartridge and being enveloped by a cloud of toner. 'As long as it makes me money.'