Your Old Laptops Are Killing People in China
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Worldwide, we generate around 20 – 30 million tons of e-waste every year. It’s a whole lot of cell phones/smart-phones, TV sets, and computers—and iPads and e-readers and all of the many, many, many things the industry is concocting to sell you in the future—being sent off, largely to overseas recycling centers often of poor repute. (Please read Motherboard’s piece from earlier this year about the messy and ugly e-waste recycling market.)
And no one should be surprised that the massive concentrations of heavy metals disturbed, via unsafe/crude disposal practices, in these overseas “recycling” centers have the capability of causing disease in their neighboring/host communities. A team of researchers have just published a study examining air conditions in Taizhou in Zhejiang province, China — an area that handles about 2-million tons of e-waste a year with the help of about 60,000 employees.
According to the study, published today in Environmental Research Letters:
Most of the dismantling workers and local residents lived in or around the dismantling industrial park. They were incessantly exposed to polluted air, without any protection. An unpublished survey has revealed that diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and various cancers have become more common during the past few decades in the area.
Indeed, the study found that, yep, the air in Taizhou has the capability of causing cancers and other problems. Basically, they took air samples from two locations around the city and exposed it to lung tissue. They looked at levels of Interleukin-8, a chemical marker of inflammation, damaging Reactive Oxygen Species, and expressions of the p53 gene, a marker that cells are being damaged. All three were significantly high.
On the Institute of Physics website, study co-author Dr Fangxing Yang, of Zhejiang University, says, “Both inflammatory response and oxidative stress may lead to DNA damage, which could induce oncogenesis, or even cancer. Of course, inflammatory response and oxidative stress are also associated with other diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases.”
Research into what, exactly, is in the air to cause these things will be for the future, but a full and immediate banning of dismantling processes that let this junk into the atmosphere would naturally be the best, and most unlikely, thing. Here, we can make sure we’re disposing of our e-waste responsibly, which means using services that are rigorous about what recycling contractors they use. Though, given how much of deterrent shitty factory conditions are to Apple customers, that’s pretty dubious as well.
Maybe the most important thing is a needed cultural shift within tech to either make electronic products that last — which doesn’t suit the market, marketing, or even the nature of technology — or make them with less heavy metals and other bad-for-you things. Seems so simple.
Please read Motherboard’s guide to doing right with your old electronics.
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About the author
Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
