Dante’s Digital Junkyard

The peasant works without a break, smashing cellphone chargers, battery packs from laptop computers and other electronic refuse. With scarred hands, he picks through the splintered debris for copper, bronze and anything else that might have value.

Every day, Luo Yinghong and others like him claw through mountains of discarded high-tech equipment, looking for reusable materials. The waste piles have turned this onetime rice-farming community into a foul-smelling, toxic digital junkyard.

“I’ve been doing this for almost nine years. Even if it is harmful to my health, what else can I do?” said Luo, 28, who comes from Sichuan province. “I am just a migrant worker. I can’t afford to worry.”

A growing graveyard of the Information Age, filled with cables, keyboards, cathode-ray tubes and motherboards, stretches for miles in this corner of Guangdong province on China’s southern coast. Luo is one of an estimated 100,000 scavengers who scrape together a precarious existence here.

For a decade, ships have been bringing the waste from foreign countries, mainly the United States, in huge containers. Drivers load it onto trucks, mopeds and tricycles and deliver it to places like this.

China is the world’s largest destination for e-trash, and Guiyu, a cluster of villages close to major ports, is one of the biggest reprocessing centers.

Local entrepreneurs buy the trash in bulk and employ migrant laborers to break it down to its constituent parts, which are sold and reused. The work is dirty and dangerous. Computer components are roasted over coal fires, for instance, or treated with acid to extract copper, gold and other metals.

Few, if any, precautions are taken to protect the workers or the environment against lead, mercury, cadmium and other toxic substances found in monitors, keyboards and other electronic refuse.

Women and men with no protective gear, sometimes with babies strapped to their backs, sift through the junk, fishing for salvageable parts before dumping the remains into open fields to be burned, or into long-dead rivers.

Despite a government ban on hazardous imports and periodic crackdowns, the electronic-waste business thrives. As much as 90% of the e-trash generated by the U.S. ends up as “recyclables” in China. The rest is sent to India, Pakistan and other developing countries.

“You can control this thing so much easier from the exporting side, but the U.S. is being completely irresponsible,” said Jim Puckett, coordinator for the Basel Action Network, or BAN, a Seattle-based environmental group.

“Americans are able to externalize real pollution costs and dump it onto another country,” Puckett said. “Everybody is getting a free ride and everybody is looking the other way.”

The United States will have discarded an estimated 500 million computers between 1997 and 2007, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a San Jose-based advocacy group. Californians alone buy more than 3 million TVs and 5 million personal computers a year, and thousands of older models are discarded every day, according to the California Environmental Protection Agency.

The United States is the only developed country that has not ratified the 1989 Basel Convention prohibiting the export of hazardous materials, including e-waste. An official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited legal technicalities as the reason.

“The administration is currently drafting ... legislation to be sent to Congress. Passage of this legislation would enable us to ratify the convention,” said Dave Ryan, an EPA spokesman. It is unclear when that might happen.

A few years ago, most Americans probably didn’t know where their old computers went. Some believed they had done the right thing by taking their used PCs to local recyclers. But in many cases, brokers sold the waste to middlemen who shipped it to China. Corrupt Chinese officials whisked the discards through customs.

Two years ago, a coalition of environmental groups, including BAN, conducted a study that documented the huge flow of American e-trash to Asia and the resulting environmental damage. To their dismay, the findings stirred little outrage and led to no significant change.

“There was a time when [people could] say they were ignorant,” Puckett said. “But that time has long passed. Now there is no excuse.”

With no federal rules on e-waste, some states are taking action on their own. In 2001, California banned the dumping of computer monitors and televisions in landfills. Last September, then-Gov. Gray Davis signed the nation’s first law requiring recycling of electronic junk. A surcharge on sales of computers and TVs will fund recycling operations. The fees take effect July 1 and will range from $6 to $10 per product.

The law also aims to restrict exports of e-waste. Waste-disposal firms must give the state 60 days’ notice before shipping such trash abroad and must demonstrate that the destination country permits such imports and will dispose of the material responsibly.

An array of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, supported the law. BAN leaders, however, predict that unscrupulous operators will finds ways around the export restrictions.

China is not waiting for the United States to stem the flow of junk. Under a policy announced this year, any vessel carrying illegal e-waste will be turned away from Chinese ports.

But enforcement is likely to be spotty. Even if the crackdown is effective, environmentalists fear suppliers will turn elsewhere, possibly to Vietnam and the Philippines, among other countries.

As long as Americans are unwilling to dump their castoffs in their own back yard, they will need places like Guiyu.

“I’d rather be farming,” said a villager willing to give only his family name, Li. The 38-year-old father of three runs a recycling business on the ground floor of his two-story home.

“But there is no more land to farm. So everybody does this. If you don’t, you starve,” he said, downing a tiny cup of a rich, espresso-like tea through teeth so decayed they looked like kernels of burnt corn.

Over the years, a division of labor has developed among the four villages that make up Guiyu. One specializes in sorting plastics; another concentrates on taking apart printers. Workers in Li’s village burn circuit boards to extract semiconductors and other components, one of the most environmentally damaging aspects of the recycling process.

Li employs one worker to break apart computer hard drives and two others to burn circuit boards over a grill-like metal sheet heated by cakes of coal, much like a barbecue. The men work for about $5 a day burning off the solder, plucking off chips and tossing them into buckets for resale.

Since the government began to crack down a few years ago, workers have become less open about what they do. They work behind brick walls or beneath tarps, but it is easy to find them. Lead fumes escape and heaps of discards litter the areas.

Many workers seem oblivious to the health risks they are taking.

“I’ve been doing this for a decade. Look at me: I am fine,” said one man, stooping over his stove, flipping chips off the boards with pliers. Tattered cotton gloves were his only protection.

A few steps down the road, more than a dozen women sat side by side, leaning over sizzling grills hidden behind a brick wall. The women tossed spent circuit boards through a tiny window onto a growing mound outside. Farther along the country road, laborers in abandoned buildings and on the sides of streets pulled copper from telephone cable.

Loud crunching noises emanated from homes where workers were feeding computer casings and cellphones into grinders that spit out tiny pieces of plastic. Outside, men in slippers and rolled-up pants washed the plastic in ceramic jugs and spread the pieces out on the sidewalk to dry.

Older children helped out by picking through the plastic chips and sorting them by color. The fragments are eventually sold and reprocessed into cups, containers and other goods. Toddlers squatted between the junk piles, watching 5-ton trucks unload more e-waste packed in bulging burlap sacks.

Nearby, chickens and ducks pecked for food scraps among discarded ink-jet cartridges on a riverbank. A shaggy guard dog barked at strangers approaching a family warehouse stacked high with mangled PCs.

In the distance, waste that could not be recycled smoldered in fields once used for crops.

“This business has been a critical part of the local economy for about a decade. It’s almost impossible to get rid of it overnight,” said Lai Yun, a member of the environmental group Greenpeace who has monitored the situation in Guiyu for several years.

In exchange for some cash, local officials look the other way, villagers say.

“The Communist Party doesn’t care what we do, as long as they get money from us,” said a laborer from a village that specializes in recovering plastics. “If we stopped doing this, we wouldn’t be able to pay them anything.”

According to an informal survey by students at a local medical school, salvage workers suffer from skin, neurological and respiratory problems. Headaches, dizziness and coughs are the most common.

“Of course it’s not safe, and sooner or later it’s going to catch up with us,” said Peng Dalian, a resident who employs a dozen workers to take apart cellphones in the basement of his home.

“We are lucky because we work at the low end of the pollution chain,” said Peng, who shares the house with his wife and six children. “In the village where they burn acids all day, they have children who are born dead or deformed. But we’re not dead yet. We have to keep doing this so we don’t starve to death.”

Those performing the most dangerous jobs tend to be migrant laborers who can’t afford medical help.

“My health has definitely deteriorated since I came here,” said Luo, the peasant from Sichuan province. “If I’m meant to live, I’ll live. If I’m meant to die, I’ll die. I can only leave it up to fate.”

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Zhang Xiuying of The Times’ Shanghai Bureau contributed to this report.