CHINA: Welcome to the Guiyu tea ceremony. Boss Guo sets a pair of thimble-sized tea cups on a ceremonial tray. He half fills one of the tiny cups with distilled water from a bottle. Into the other he pours water from the well in his backyard. Then he fills both up with steaming Chinese tea. The cup with bottled water turns a healthy amber. The one with the well water instantly converts to an impenetrable black.
Guo, a brash young man dressed in a purple polyester suit and white shirt, doesn't know why. He says he sees no connection between the stacks of dismembered electrical equipment in his workshop behind us and the strange quality of his water. Still, he won't drink the black tea. "We won't even shower with that water," he says.
Guiyu, near China's southeastern coast, is the centre of an uncontrolled environmental disaster. Here and in several nearby townships, electronic waste, most of it imported, is broken up in small workshops. It's a version of outsourcing that saves wealthier countries the high cost of disposing of their electronic trash. In this part of China, recycling e-waste is apparently free of any environmental or health and safety regulation.
The result is a landscape that varies from filthy to apocalyptic. In small workshops and yards and in the open countryside, workers dismember the detritus of modernisation. Armed mostly with small hand tools, they take apart old computers, monitors, printers, video and DVD players, photocopying machines, telephones and chargers, music speakers, car batteries and microwave ovens.
The scrap sites here are a cornucopia of technology brand names - Dell, Compaq, IBM, Apple, Sun, NEC, LG and Motorola are just some of the names we found in the piles of tech junk, made in the USA, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Austria, Germany and Britain.
Chinese law forbids the importation of electronic waste and Beijing is also a signatory to the Basle agreement, an international treaty banning the shipment of e-waste from the developed to the developing world. But so far official prohibitions have been about as effective as the official banners urging environmental protection that flap in the breeze above the trash congested streets of Guiyu.
A rash of similar waste sites has broken out further up the coast. Enforcement is difficult because China's economic boom is driving price hikes on the world's metals markets. Raging domestic demand has China sucking in metals in any form it can.
Take copper as an example. In 2003, China passed the US as the world's biggest consumer of copper. A year later, it was eating up almost 50 per cent more copper than the US, and three times more than Japan. In such a market, the demand for scrap metals, including electronic waste, is enormous.
And there's an important push factor - the high cost of disposing of electronic waste in advanced economies. The cost of landfill is increasing and several European countries and some US states have banned outright the disposal of e-waste in landfills or by incineration.
Some in China are fighting back against the avalanche of imported junk. An increasingly vocal environmental lobby inside and outside government is helping push through new legislation in an effort to stem the tide of imports, as well as the increasing swell of domestically-produced electronic waste.
Starting April 1st next, a number of amendments to an existing law on solid waste disposal are expected to extend the responsibility of pollution prevention and treatment to producers, sellers, importers and users of electronic equipment. They will also seek to reduce the number of toxins used in manufacturing electronic equipment.
Environmentalists advocate a two-pronged response. One is the extension and application of existing laws against the transshipment of toxic waste. The other, akin to China's proposed new regulations, is to persuade the industry to dispense with toxic material in the production of computers and other electronic equipment.
For example, Greenpeace has got commitments from Samsung and Nokia to phase out the use of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in printed circuit boards and they are working on making other toxic substances redundant in the manufacturing process. BFRs are used widely in consumer goods to prevent fires - about 5 million tonnes are produced annually - but their least degradable components can accumulate in the environment and food chain (they have been found in fish and human breast milk) and may be carcinogenic, say health experts.
Unaware of these issues, workers in Guiyu painstakingly reduce every piece of equipment to its smallest components.
These are then farmed off to "specialists", workers dedicated to, say, stripping wires for the copper they contain or melting the lead solder from circuit boards. Others place circuit boards in open acid baths to separate precious metals including the tiny quantities of gold and palladium they contain. Plastics are graded by quality and other parts are burned to separate plastic from scrap metal. After this thorough dismembering, any remaining combustibles are left to burn in open fires - leaving an acrid stench of plastic, rubber and paint in the air. Nowhere are face masks, goggles, extractor fans or any other kind of health and safety equipment to be seen.
The environmental cost is real. Streams are black and pungent and choked with industrial waste. British scientist Kevin Brigden tested streams in the Guiyu area and found acid baths leaching into them. The streams had a Ph reading of 1 or 2, that of a strong acid. That's powerful enough to disintegrate a penny after a few hours, says Brigden. There's also an economic cost. In Guiyu, the price of water is 10 times more than in Chendian, the neighbouring township that is today the main source of Guiyu's water.
"We used to draw our water from the lake," says an elderly man, jerking his head in the direction of the putrid cesspit we had driven past a few minutes before. "But that was nearly 20 years ago." On the baking street in front of him, a huge plastic tank perched on the back of a three-wheeled agriculture vehicle dispenses water to Guiyu residents.
In the past two decades, incomes have risen sharply, even as the quality of the environment has plunged. Locals, who were initially driven to garbage recycling by their poverty, have become middle class.
Unburdened by the costs of safe recycling, Boss Guo gives an example of the economics behind e-waste disposal in Guiyu. He pays about 50,000 Rmb (almost €5,000) for a tonne of circuit boards. When all the parts are disassembled, some of them for sale to domestic home-appliance makers and repair shops, and the precious metals recovered, he makes a profit of around 100,000 Rmb (almost €10,000), he claims.
Many of the locals have moved out of their traditional single-storey homes into new three- and four-storey buildings where the ground floor is reserved as a scrap sorting workshop. Now they employ migrant workers from poor parts of Sichuan, Anhui, Henan and other inland provinces to risk their health in this toxic business.
For the migrants, this is as close as they'll come to bridging the digital divide.
Xiao Li has never sat at a computer, logged on to the internet, used a printer or a photocopier, but he has spent the last six years processing high-tech equipment from around the world. He makes around US$ 5 per day melting lead solder off circuit boards and says life is better here than in his remote farming village in the mountains of Sichuan. "If I had stayed there I'd be farming one mu [one-sixteenth of a hectare] of land," he explains.
The great escape from rural poverty that is part of China's wrenching economic transformation is never far away. "It's just like sorting peanuts, corn and rice," says 18-year-old Chen when asked how he grades the different types of plastic scraps he is tossing into wicker baskets. "You just know the difference." But is this a better life? Most of these peasants-turned-workers say it is, albeit by a narrow margin. "It's a bit better than home," says one weary middle-aged woman from Henan's Shangqiu county, who works out of a rough shack inside a scrap yard. "There it's too poor. We barely had enough to eat." She makes between 200 and 300 yuan (€20-€30) per month in Guiyu.
Xiao Li, who has been here longer and makes more money, has a TV and a mobile phone and shares a room in one of the old village houses rented out by the local owners who have moved into a four-storey house in the township. He doesn't mind the pollution. "We are used to it," says the cheery 22-year-old, "and there is no impact on my health." He is probably wrong. Only limited investigations have been carried out on the health effects of Guiyu's poisoned environment, but those that have paint an alarming picture. One of them was carried out last year by Prof Huo Xia, of the Shantou University Medical College, an hour and a half's drive from Guiyu. She tested 165 children aged between one and six at a Guiyu kindergarten for concentrations of lead in their blood. Eighty-two per cent of the children had blood/lead levels of more than 100. Anything above that figure is considered unsafe by international health experts including the Atlanta-based Centre for Disease Control.
The average reading for the group was 149. High levels of lead in children's blood can impact IQ and the development of the central nervous system, say doctors. And there was a direct correlation with the local industry; the highest concentrations of lead were found in the children of parents whose workshop dealt with circuit boards and the lowest was among those who recycled plastic.
A separate report by the Shantou Medical University Hospital in 2003 found a high incidence of skin damage, headaches, vertigo, nausea, chronic gastritis, and gastric and duodenal ulcers, especially among migrants who recycle circuit boards and plastic.
A local doctor told us there was also a higher than normal incidence of miscarriages and handicapped babies among those who worked with e-waste. Much of this kind of information remains anecdotal because the hospitals have not been authorised to fully investigate the incidence of waste-related illness among their patients, the doctor said.
The veil of silence means that nobody is held to account for the environmental and human impact of globalisation in Guiyu.
There are plenty of people who should be held accountable and some who should not. "Lots of people are responsible," says Dr Huo. "The bosses who run these businesses, the companies who ship the material, and many others, "but certainly not the workers", she adds. "They are poor peasants and don't understand the damage this does to them."
A tale of two townships
Few Guiyu residents question the cost of this development and most downplay the price to their health and the damage to the environment. But an alternative model sits next door to them, offering a modern Chinese tale of two townships.
Chendian, the source of Guiyu's fresh water, is no Eden. Its streets are dusty and streams in the town are fouled with household waste. But the air is cleaner and at least you can drink the water. Why? Chendian took a different road to economic development.
"Chendian, China's famous underwear township", proclaims a sign straddling the bridge that marks the border with Guiyu.
The contrast with between the two adjacent townships is striking. The skyline in Chendian is dominated by advertising hoardings of pretty underwear models; in Guiyu, it's punctuated by towers of toxic black smoke. In Chendian, thousands of smart young female factory workers, drawn from around southern China, parade up and down the street after work and at factory break times; in Guiyu, poorly-dressed migrants from China's poorest counties huddle in shanties next to putrid streams.
There are more than 500 underwear factories in Chendian, employing 40,000 workers and accounting for over half the industrial output, according to the local government.
Getting information about the local economy and environment from the Guiyu government is difficult. Like the residents, they are wary of outsiders asking questions about the trash business. Still, press reports from Shantou say trash recycling makes up around 80 per cent of Guiyu's economy.
When Dr Huo's team tested lead levels among the infants of Guiyu, they used Chendian as a comparison. On their own, the results were alarming: 38 per cent of children tested in Chendian had a blood/lead rate higher than 100. But they seemed respectable beside Guiyu's 82 per cent levels. More research is needed to determine whether lead levels among children in Chendian are generated locally or stem from its proximity to Guiyu.
Still, the contrast between the two places illustrates the challenge of choosing a development path amid the stampede of China's economic transition. Cursed with low-lying and frequently waterlogged fields, Guiyu residents were supplementing their farm income by processing trash even before the Communist "liberation" of China in 1949. It was a natural groove to follow when the country's economy - and garbage output - began to increase through the 1980s and 90s.
Chendian, on the other hand, was famous for its craftsmen since the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Its locksmiths, toymakers and bamboo weavers supplied markets in Guangdong and in the neighbouring provinces of Fujian, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. That tradition of local industry carried through into China's economic reforms in the 1980s as Chendian moved into clothing and plastic flowers. Underwear alone now contributes over half of Chendian's industrial production.
Meanwhile, the junk keeps coming to Guiyu. Imports of e-waste have been illegal in China since 1996, so there are no official figures on how much is coming in to the country. Environmental activists and academics in Guangdong estimate that Guiyu alone handles over a million tonnes of e-waste annually. Whatever the figure, it is obvious to any visitor that the trade goes on unhindered; scrap yards are piled high with imported waste and trucks can be seen unloading new cargo daily.
Some 2,000km away in Beijing, the central government wants the problem to go away but may have to settle for modifying its worst effects. Experts from the Industrial University in Shanghai and the Guangdong provincial environmental authorities have sketched a plan that accepts Guiyu's role as a recycling centre but one where environmental standards are observed. They envision a booming but clean recycling industry that lobbies for legal imports of e-waste and generates €490 million in annual revenues.
Even if it doesn't manage to legalise imports, there will be enough junk generated within fast-growing China to keep them busy. The country's Computer Trade Association estimates that about 2.3 million PCs, 2.7 million computer displays and 1.35 million printers were dumped domestically in 2002. The numbers are expected to grow by 25-30 per cent annually in the next five years.
Huang Jianzhong, an official at the Economic Reform and Operating Department of the Ministry of Information Industry, points out that one tonne of circuit boards can produce 130 kilograms of copper, 20 kg of tin and 450 grams of gold.
As long as those quantities of valuable metals are hidden inside our electronic appliances, Guiyu and places like it will remain in business.
"There is no real waste, only misplaced resources," says Mr Huang philosophically.