Digital Waste Worth More Than Gold, Copper Ore

tcd004 writes "Imagine sheer mountains of discarded Pentium IIIs, tractor trailers overflowing with discarded wall warts. Photojournalist Natalie Behring visited Guiyu, China and documented the world's biggest digital dump where, for $2 per day, the locals sort, disassemble, and pulverize hundreds of tons of e-waste. The payoff is huge: computer waste contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, 40 times more copper than copper ore. But the detritus also leaches chemicals and metals into local water supplies."

Imagine a digital dump

[nmoog (701216)]

1s and 0s as far as the eye can see!

Re:Imagine a digital dump

[Kris_J (10111)]

I think I saw a 2

For sale

[Mr2cents (323101)]

Ok, if anyone is interested, I have tons of used 1's and 0's in my basement. They're pre-sorted. I'm willing to sell them for 2 cents/kilobit.

The bits will be sent to you as a self-extracting executable.

Re:Imagine a digital dump

[digitig (1056110)]

I always wondered what /dev/null actually looked like!

Environmentally irresponsibility

[nmoog (701216)]

If you say that it's environmentally irresponsibility to throw away computer equipment, your girlfriend can't get mad that you've got a cluster of Amiga2000s making your house look like a digital dump.

Re:Environmentally irresponsibility

[nmoog (701216)]

Oh cut and paste. My good friend and bitterly enemy.

Re:Environmentally irresponsibility

[QuickFox (311231)]

Girlfriends and Clusters of Amiga2000s are mutually exclusive.

I realize that by asking what this means I'll lose every single geek point I might have had, as I reveal my ignorance about some arcane technology that is undoubtedly known to every geek in the Universe except me, but still I have to ask: What's a Girlfriend?

Re:Environmentally irresponsibility

[Opportunist (166417)]

What's a Girlfriend?

If I remember my Spanish right, it's the English word for "Amiga".

Re:Environmentally irresponsibility

[Xiph (723935)]

Actually, the term girlfriend (as in more than just friendly with) is "novia", "amiga" is a friend that happens to be a girl.
Of course, this is slashdot, so i guess parent is right..

Good for them

[unkaggregate (855265)]

Finding a good use for old parts. They're better than most people I know who throw away a whole computer just because the latest software won't run on it. And if they can alleviate any toxic seepage into the soils doing so even better.

It's kind of sad though that environmental laws here, even though they mean well, ultimately make it too costly for us to recycle PCs here compared to China.

Re:Good for them

[demon driver (1046738)]

It's not so much environmental laws, it's the low wages which generate manual jobs in countries like China, where, by the way, unemployment is an even greater problem than in the western world, and so is the pressure on people to get any jobs there are, even if it's going to ruin their health and shorten their lives drastically.

And regarding both environmental and social standards it would be rather short-sighted to further lower our western standards only to be more competitive to countries which are even more exploitative towards both environment and populace. Instead, efforts should go in the direction of installing world-wide minimum standards in both regards...

Re:Good for them

[ajs318 (655362)]

Instead, efforts should go in the direction of installing world-wide minimum standards in both regards...

How about a law demanding that goods may not be imported, if they were manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable in the destination country?

Re:Good for them

[mobby_6kl (668092)]

> How about a law demanding that goods may not be imported, if they were manufactured under conditions that would not be acceptable in the destination country?

How about a law that would ban US imports in France (and other european countries) because the poor American workers have to work for more than 35 hours a week?

Re:Good for them

[ajs318 (655362)]

No it wouldn't. It would, however, level the playing field. Manufacturing industry in the West can't hope to compete with third-world countries where they get away with things like not paying workers a decent wage, having them work in dangerous or unsanitary conditions, or polluting the environment. Why is it OK to treat Chinese workers like that but not British, European or American workers?

Re:Good for them

[King_TJ (85913)]

I tend to agree about tariffs being a viable option to help "level the playing field". But "Americans are, on the whole, too lazy to bother with the well being of overseas workers"??

I fail to see how "laziness" has ANYTHING to do with the discussion. It doesn't seem to me like it's America's responsibility to ensure the well being of overseas workers that don't work for our own companies. America seems like it is always called upon/expected to step in whenever there's a global issue. (Anything from cries for food or monetary assistance when a nation encounters a large disaster, to sending in troops to assist in matters which don't directly affect us.) Then, we're just as often criticized for "meddling" where we "don't belong".

The only aspect of this we should directly be concerned with in America is the financial one. (EG. Does importing from nations that refuse to uphold standards of living comparable to ours hurt OUR economy in the long-run? If yes, then we need to take actions that help fix it.) Otherwise, for all I care, China, with their poor stance on human rights and environmental issues, can wallow in their own pollution and filth.

Re:Good for them

[dave_boo (1089337)]

So another person that's wanting to apply their morality on someone else. Sex work is one of the oldest professions. If you'd have a girlfriend, you know that you have to pay. Same thing if you visit a hooker. How many slashdot geeks don't have a girlfriend because they're living in mommy's basement? All woman want security. If they can't provide for it themself, they want to make sure their mate can. Those that practice prostitution, especially in the South East Asian part of our world are just more open about it.

Take for instance my inlaws. Starting with my wife's parents. They are from up country, near Nakhon Sawan, and have, for the area, a successful life. They are farmer, raise cattle, and manufacture wooden goods such as chairs, tables, and doors. Now, even with all this income, due to the economic enviroment they're in, it's not enough. So their two daughters went to Bangkok to find work. I met my wife working in a 7-11, where about 5000 THB($143) a month. Her sister got a job working in a metal factory. She's only making 6000 THB($172) a month. Now, if you figure that rent will cost you around 3000 THB($86) a month (that includes utilities--but don't be expecting to run the air con or have more than a single room and forget about hot water), you're left with 3000 THB($86). Even if you sent NO money home, that leaves you with 100 Bhat($3) a day. Granted, you can take on roomates, but with the aforementioned living conditions, how many can you realistically accomodate? Let's say you take on 1 roomate. That lowers you monthly expenses for the room to 1500 bhat($43), leaving you with 4500 THB($129). So you're now looking at 150 THB($4) a day. Still not much, but if you could live on 100 THB($3) a day, you can send home 1500 THB($43) a month.

Now, they have 2 younger brothers. Both are in school, but they have to pay. The older one's school is 6000 THB($172), and the younger is 3000 THB($86). The family is very much into making this sacrifice because they don't wish for the boys to live the same life that they've been subjected to. So, just for making the payments, the family needs to come up with 9000 THB($257) every month. This doesn't cover room and board for the older one either. Add in costs raised from just living, you can see that money is always tight. The fact that farming is a seasonal income does absolutely nothing to improve their situation. I've been trying to get them to become more reliant on the furniture making portion of their life, possibly paying workers to man their fields, but they're stubborn old people. Add in the constant bill paying, house upkeep, taxes (government has to get their share!).

I've taken over the responsibilty of paying for their educations. This has been a huge financial boon for the family. I was truly appalled at the teaching conditions in their old shool. It was practically rote learning, which I hate with a passion. If you can't teach someone to learn on their own, they aren't learning.

But I digress. Going back to the prostitution business. A girl can work in a bar and make anywhere from 500 THB(14) to 3000 THB($86) a night. Obviously, the more they sling their "goods", the more they make. Not only that, some even end up with sponsors (which I never understood) who pay for them not to continue working. Quite a few of those with sponsors continue working in the bars, so not only do they have a steady income from some foreign sponsor, but continue to make money on an almost daily basis going with customers. Do they need to do this. Obviously not. Does it make more money for family. Assuredly. I wouldn't expect someone who is not of Asian origin to fully understand the ties between family (I'm not Asian, so I can't understand it fully, but I respect it), but the duty that people feel for taking care of their family is real. Everyone takes jobs they wouldn't necessarily agree with, but make more money for them.

The culture also doesn't stigmatise prostitution like most Western one

The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too

[tcd004 (134130)]

anyone who can dismantle supertankers [foreignpolicy.com] with their bare hands deserves some respect.

Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too

[value_added (719364)]

anyone who can dismantle supertankers with their bare hands deserves some respect.

Not a Chinese story, but an Indian one. ;-) IIRC, there was PBS/Frontline type of special not too long on the subject. The supertanker dismantling was featured, but so was a program run by an Indian scientist of some sort that involved the disassembly and salvage of computers and computer parts. It was interesting to note how large and well run the operation was. The owner, keenly aware of both the monetary value and the environmental hazards of the work, was sympathetic to the workers but made it clear that despite the nature of the work and the few dollars per day they earned, his employees would have no work whatsoever. I guess happiness is where you find it.

Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too

[by Anonymous Coward]

The owner, keenly aware of both the monetary value and the environmental hazards of the work, was sympathetic to the workers but made it clear that despite the nature of the work and the few dollars per day they earned, his employees would have no work whatsoever [if this job was not available]

  Yeah, that's the usual platitude in defense of sweatshops. That it's the "best alternative of a bad lot."

  Thing is, the people who use this line usually don't mention why the other choices are so few and so bad. It's due to economic policy and the pressure of foreign multinationals to "modernize" the economy of third world nations, and it's nothing new.
  Back in England there was a thing called 'The Enclosure of the Commons.' This was a period when the people of England had their self-subsistence systematically taken away from them by force of law. New rules took away rights to previously public land and put restrictions on personal gardening on small plots, so people who previously grew their own food or traded with their neighbors were suddenly forced to buy at the markets, which required money, which meant getting a job, probably at a factory. It was frequently justified at the time by letters written by wealthy industrialists (who, in a completely unrelated fact, were having a hard time getting a self-sufficient people of artisans, craftsmen, and farmers to come in and apply for jobs in factories for pennies a week) claiming that leisure-time was bad for people and would lead the commoners to crime and wickedness and perhaps even revolutionary politics. (Gasp!)
  Similar things have happened and are happening all over the world. People have their traditional way of life destroyed, their self-sufficiency ripped away from them, and in the end, are given the 'free choice' of hard labor in a sweatshop or dying of starvation. ...and we're supposed to applaud that?

  There's a good post on Kevin Carson's Mutualist blog on the whole 'Sweatshops Ain't So Bad!' argument over here. [blogspot.com] No, I'm not affiliated, actually I'm more of a red anarchist sort than a mutualist, but damned if he isn't one of the smartest people writing on the internet.

Thoughts on recycling

[WindBourne (631190)]

Since 1965, I have been a recyler (cub scouts and boy scouts). Generally, it is paper, glass, and metal. It always struck me as the right thing to do. But the other day it dawned on me that it might be a mistake to do some of this. In particular for the metals. Paper, plastics, and glass will decay if they are not recycled, so it makes good sense to do them right away. But metals are a different issue. It struck me that we might wish to consider simply putting them in a dump for future use. The reason is that somewhere down the road, a number of metals will be very expensive. One example is copper. A number of mines will be used up (much sooner rather than later). While China is about to have 1-2 major copper mines come on-line (in Tibet, they have found a number of resources which is why they actually built the Tibetan railroad), in general, copper has been massively extracted. Within my lifetime, copper is going to head towards being VERY valuable. It seems that it would benefit the countries to garbage dump any waste and then work on creating GOOD extraction approaches. The idea of paying to ship our electronic "waste" to other countries has to be one of the most ludicrous actions that the west takes.

what's the alternative?

[nanosquid (1074949)]

I suspect that gold mining itself does a lot more damage than this kind of recycling. And what are the alternatives? Dump it into a dump and not recycle it? That will leach even more toxic metals into the ground. Or stop producing electronics altogether?

I think it's good that this stuff is being recycled at all. We should now focus on:

-- reducing the amount of heavy metals we put into electronics

-- improving the safety and working conditions of the people doing the recycling

-- redesigning electronics to reduce overall waste and make parts easier to recycle

-- making sure that more electronics reach those countries in working order (open hardware standards and increasing compatibility can help with that)

Re:Quick solution : out of sight, out of mind

[will_die (586523)]

People are not dumping this stuff on theses countries, thoses countries are paying for all this scrap.
The larger of the recycling places actually have people going all around the world tring to purchase large quantities.
The question is do the richer country act as big brother and say they will not sell the items to theses poorer countries?

Re:Who cares about the gold and copper?

[dreddnott (555950)]

I used to work for an electronics recycling company, trueCycle [truecycle.com].

Not the most scrupulous incorporation in the high desert, but we processed a LOT.

A good day would have us processing 10 tons (20,000 pounds) of various electronics, most of it selling to final-stage processors for $0.10 to somewhere $1.00 per pound, depending on which gaylord (motherboards, transformers, glass, CPUs, HDDs, etc) and of course the fluctuations in the volatile commodities market.

The biggest cash cow, of course, was leaded CRT glass - thanks to SB20 and SB50, our processing of CRT glass was subsidised and we received a flat rate of $0.48 per pound on just that, smashed or not smashed. This was lucrative due to the commonality of monitors and the density of the glass, as well as the fact that at any given time we had 10 guys with clawhammers and pneumatic screwdrivers absolutely tearing everything up that I let them get their hands on.

I worked as Quality Assurance, assessing pallets as they came in and rescuing the good stuff, as well as miscellaneous server and network administration work. You know, the usual stuff when your department knows more about computers than the entire rest of the company, which happened to be too cheap for a dedicated IT staff and commensurate payroll. While I did indeed fix up more than a few computers for eBay and local buyers, the 90% discount and the general poor condition of incoming electronics as well as poor working conditions, chronic understaffing, and a tragic lack of space made resurrecting computers a very small portion of the revenue stream.

Selling components was a lot more successful, and I always argued for doing this with my coworkers and supervisors. We would sell hundreds of thoroughly-tested HDDs, video cards, RAM sticks, and CPUs of all types at a time. It amazed me at the time (2005-2006) to see how many people were still interested in 10GB drives, 64MB PC100 sticks, and GeForce2 MX cards.

My favourite part of the job, however, was finding and rescuing antique/vintage computing equipment [photobucket.com]. The contract with Dreamworks was also pretty exciting, although 99% of it ended up as unrecognisable scrap. I found myself face to face with an SGI Iris 4D and an even larger system in bad shape that I could not identify, as well as several battered workstations (one labeled "FOONLY" in obvious homage).

Re:Who cares about the gold and copper?

[dreddnott (555950)]

How do I searched web? Come on, this isn't 4chan, is it?

I went to bed right after posting my previous post so you were tragically left in the care of another Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't really bother me.

A gaylord is, yes, a large cardboard box designed to take up one pallet. The cardboard sides are about an inch thick which makes them very tough and quite reusable even when minimum-wage demanufacturing crews throw hundreds of hard drives or power supplies into them all day long. Infrastructure would sometimes cut out part of the side to make unloading the incoming material onto pallets for logging and sorting easier. A little bit more civilised, anyways, than what I saw in the photo essay.

Re:This is amusing

[gigne (990887)]

They actually pay to buy our scrap. They own it. It is up to them if they want to harvest it for the goodies. We have no right to complain here.