China’s Dirty Secret: 60 Minutes Follows America’s Electronic Waste
November 13, 2008 · Print This Article
The gangs who run the electronic wasteland in China don’t want you to see it. In fact, they’re so keen on keeping it out of the media that they attacked a 60 Minutes crew that was attempting to document the frightening, toxic mess full of lead, cadmium, chromium, polyvinyl chloride and other dangerous substances. But, 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley got the scoop anyway, exposing what happens when our electronics are illegally shipped overseas for dumping.
From CBS News:
It’s worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.
At a recycling event in Denver, 60 Minutes found cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks, in a line that lasted for hours. They were there to drop off their computers, PDAs, TVs and other electronic waste.
Asked what he thought happens once his e-waste goes into recycling, one man told Pelley, “Well my assumption is they break it apart and take all the heavy metals and out and then try to recycle some of the stuff that’s bad.”
Most folks in line were hoping to do the right thing, expecting that their waste would be recycled in state-of-the-art facilities that exist here in America. But really, there’s no way for them to know where all of this is going. The recycling industry is exploding and, as it turns out, some so-called recyclers are shipping the waste overseas, where it’s broken down for the precious metals inside.
60 Minutes followed the container of e-waste that was collected in Denver for 7,459 miles to Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong. It turned out that the carton of e-waste that would supposedly be ‘recycled’ was just one of thousands on an illegal smuggling route, to be dumped in poor communities. The town of Guiyu was described by 60 Minutes as ‘a sort of Chernobyl of electronic waste’.
Greenpeace has been filming around Guiyu and caught the recycling work. Women were heating circuit boards over a coal fire, pulling out chips and pouring off the lead solder. Men were using what is literally a medieval acid recipe to extract gold. Pollution has ruined the town. Drinking water is trucked in. Scientists have studied the area and discovered that Guiyu has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. They found pregnancies are six times more likely to end in miscarriage, and that seven out of ten kids have too much lead in their blood.
The whole article over at the 60 Minutes website is definitely worth a read. It’s a sobering reality check for anyone who thought that recycling drives are the answer to our massive electronic waste problem. Both consumers and manufacturers have got to take responsibility for where these products end up when they’ve outlived their usefulness to us.
Watch a video of the attack on the 60 Minutes crew at The Huffington Post.
Link [60 Minutes]
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How sad that we don’t realize the true impact of our wasteful lifestyles. Also– I think that people are often intimidated by the process of finding an electronics recycler. What recycles? What doesn’t? Where do I go, etc.
The article left out the name of the company, which by the way is called Executive Recycling and they are based in Englewood, CO. The CEO was caught red-handed and lied on TV about the container of cathode ray tubes he illegally dumped in China.
This is a perfect example of a “green” company that is really just making the environmental movement into a total sham. What’s even worse is that what this company did was totally illegal. Even landfills and waste management firms have to obey the law.
People really need to open their eyes a little more to these recycling firms. A lot of them are really not doing anything green, in fact some do more harm than good as in this case.