Digital Waste Worth More Than Gold, Copper Ore 302
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Imagine a digital dump (Score:5, Funny)
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Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
Fry: Don't worry, Bender: there's no such thing as two.
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For sale (Score:5, Funny)
The bits will be sent to you as a self-extracting executable.
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Re:Imagine a digital dump (Score:5, Funny)
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Environmentally irresponsibility (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Environmentally irresponsibility (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Environmentally irresponsibility (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Environmentally irresponsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
If I remember my Spanish right, it's the English word for "Amiga".
Re:Environmentally irresponsibility (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, this is slashdot, so i guess parent is right..
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You mean, like, it could be a girl that can
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Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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The true irony of this situation (Score:2)
Instead of "investing" your money in a bank account at 1% below the rate of inflation, buy some unit trusts (funds in the US I think) which invest in the developing world. (It's good practice to diversify anyway) You'll get a 10-20% return and you'll be pushing money into these developing economies, increasing employment and ultimately improving working conditions.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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So another person that's wanting to apply their morality on someone else. Sex work is one of the oldest professions
Your indifference to one of the world's biggest humanitary problems does not make it better. You're clearly not seeing that even your own words indicate that many women who live below the standards of those you were talking about come to prostitution only as a last resort, while they'd never even think about it under economically secure conditions. And, exceptions notwithstanding, prostitution has always been that way, in any place on the globe. It may well be, though, that in regions where the "normal" ex
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Bullshit. I've spent more on boyfriends than they have me. Sex shouldn't be about money, and the faster society gets over that concept the better things will be. Anyways, your wife's family sucks. The girls have to get crap jobs, but the boys get to go to school? And the girls have to send money home to pay for their schooling when they can barely make by themselves? Maybe if the people there found it just as important to send the girls to sc
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Trying to describe "western-run sweat-shops" as the great new saviour for third-world countries, just because their exploitation is slightly less brutal than that of "local ones" (I won't take that as a proven r
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Trying to describe "western-run sweat-shops" as the great new saviour for third-world countries
I didn't way they were a good thing, merely that before people condemned them they should consider the facts.
Back on topic a bit: many people seem unaware that just as there's a European wide RoHS directive, so there's one in China too which is more stringent and posing problems for European exporters.
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Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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I see no reason to let them profit because American's are on the whole too lazy to bother with the well being of overseas workers.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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This reminds me of a quote by a Communist worker from the excellent book Wild Swans [amazon.com]:
"How can you even think about such things [in this context, asking a girl out on a date] while the capitalists in America are living in an abyss of misery?"
This was around the times of the hideous (and Mao-imposed) famines in the Great Leap Forward.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe... (Score:3, Funny)
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Which only sounds infeasible for those who insist that the current system of "distributing" the world's wealth is in order. The world's wealth as an absolute value would actually be more than adequate for no single human being having to remain poor.
Clearly you are 10 years old. Rather than relying on your idealistic model of how humans should behave, try observing how humans actually behave. I suggest you investigate human psychology and economics, which is simply human psychology applied to money.
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Depends on what you mean by the 'western world'. if you mean the United States, we have a less than 5% unemployment rate, which means we are actually experiencing a labor shortage. (http://www.bls.gov/ 4.5% in April)
Instead, efforts should go in the direction of installing world-wide minimum standards in both regards...
Enforceable by whom?
Also, who are we to tell third world nations how to live? If it means that citizens can earn enough money
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I gave it back with ubuntu installed on it, and they're still using it. (my good deed this year).
The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too (Score:5, Informative)
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But poor joke aside, that's amazing - I had no idea they broke apart ships like that
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It's an interesting video BTW.
Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too (Score:4, Informative)
Not a Chinese story, but an Indian one.
Re:The shipbreaking essay is pretty sweet too (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
get the power back in your hands, stop slavery! (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why the Fairtrade movement is so awesome. It puts the power in the hands of the consumer (where it always has been really)
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1) Foreign multinationals typically have nothing to do with living standards in developing countries, which were like that long before they ever got involved. Trying to manipulate an entire government, just so you can move your factories there is just not proftiable because it creates an immense free rider problem: all of your competitors can then get the cheap labor without paying your costs. I would agree with your hypothesis in places where one company is given a sort of monop
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You probably mean 60 Minutes... "The Shipbreakers" by Michael Gavshon aired on 2006/Nov/05.
That, however, was not in the program, and I don't remember it anything quite like it, so it's unlikely whatever you're reme
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it is a seperate country.
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Looks like even they have their standards [blogs.com], though.
I remember seeing these container ships cruise by - our Coast Guard ship would be going north at 12-13 kts and they'd be going south at 40 kts... lots of mass and lots of relative velocity there. Even with a CPA of a mile they were pretty impressive.
Where have I heard this before? (Score:3, Funny)
Bender, is that you?
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Who cares about the gold and copper? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about the gold and copper? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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I was referring to a short ton, or what we here in the primitive Thirteen Colonies deign to refer to as simply "ton". I assumed that you would be exposed to at least one more of the many types of tons than your very own long ton, and I even included the lbs conversion to clarify. It might interest you to know than both the long ton and the short ton are 20cwt, and that the cwt's weight in pounds is dependent on which ton you're referring to.
Although I'm not the biggest supporte
Re:Who cares about the gold and copper? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Dang... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm lucky if I get 4 Thorium ore from one mine
Quick solution : out of sight, out of mind (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this is a very irresponsible way to dispose off the toxic waste. Sure, the rich can claim that it is actually beneficial to the local economy in the poor countries. As the article mentioned, some dump site employs as many as 100,000 people. And sure, it's a global economy, meaning that anything can be "exported".
But, have we ever considered the consequences to the planet as a whole? After all, this planet belongs to everyone, and we should take up the responsibility to protect it better. The rich countries have the proper means and resources to handle the wastes better than the poor countries. But instead, we all chose the easy way out: we just let the poor poison the planet. It's currently poisoning China's, India's and Nigeria's backyard, so that America, Europe, Japan etc, can have their own little clean and green lawn.
Guess what happens when they run out of dumping ground? I visited a site a couple of years ago. I happened to ask what they would do in this case. The foreman said:"Easy, there are plenty of fishermen out of job, as the fish stock is running out. They would be happy to help us dump into the ocean." Ha, same attitude as to how the rich get rid off their wastes.
Good to know that we are all alike, rich or poor. Eventually, it will come to bite us all back from behind. Happy dumping, everyone.
Re:Quick solution : out of sight, out of mind (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Speak for yourself. In NO WAY does the planet "belong to everyone", if we really believed that our social structure would not put profits over people, we would have much less homelessness and poverty and the Walton's daughter could never afford to spend 68,000,000 on a painting.
Is your glass half empty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Digital waste (Score:2)
Excellent PDF on the subject (Score:3, Informative)
Old story (Score:2, Troll)
Or is this just the annual repeat of a "look how evil the Unites States is" story?
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Stupidity (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if it is true that computer-trash contains 17 times the gold, compared to gold-ore, it does not follow that it is "worth more", that would be true only if getting the raw-material, handling it and extracting the valuable metals cost precisely the same. Which ain't likely.
You also don't find all that many million-ton piles of computer-scrap just sitting around.
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If you think that collecting 100 tons of computer-waste (aproximately 10.000 - 30.000 computers!) in one spot is cheaper than digging out 20 cubic meter of rock, well, then that's your problem.
The metal-parts in a typical compu
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Another Communist Post (Score:2, Informative)
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Please do some googling for the terms "real exchange rate" "big mac index" and "cost of living" and get back to us. I don't care that I make 15x what a Chinese worker makes because my home and food cost 15x as much as well.
It's like those late-night "charity" commercials: OMFG!! So-and-so only makes A DOLLAR A DAY
Thoughts on recycling (Score:5, Interesting)
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Plastic won't decay for the next millennium. Glass, to my knowledge, doesn't really decay either, and if it does, it just gets ground up to sand again. Paper certainly decays, but it may be less resource-intensive to plant and cut down trees than to recycle used paper...
Metals, however, certainly do decay. Rust, oxidization, etc., etc.
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In my neighborhood, in suburban Denver, if a house looks abandoned for more than about two weeks, people break in to strip out the copper. Abandoned buildings that are due to be demolished always have big "NO COPPER" or "COPPER ALREADY GONE" spraypainted across the front. And for a Darwin Award, a guy here got electrocuted a couple months back because he tried to strip the copper out of a running powerline transformer. When the p
As I said before, wait til the digital TV switch (Score:3, Informative)
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what's the alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
I'm such an addict (Score:2, Funny)
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The payoff? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a load of bullshit. If the payoff was "huge", why would companies pay to have it taken away to China? Gold ore is much easier to process in bulk from fairly homogeneous rock than trying to extract it from a pile of metal, plastic and glass components. Gold ore is anything from 0.5 ppm up, so this "17 times" is a meaningless figure. At best, it means a few grammes of gold per tonne of hardware. How many hundreds of manhours would it take to break it down and separate out the tiny scrapings of gold from electrical contacts? Copper is more easily scavenged from wiring and power supplies.
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And yes, these materials are more easily scavenged from other items -- but I bet that's already being done. This is a relatively new option for Chinese workers, and they're willing to take the health ris
Mirror? (Score:2)
Our future "mining" will all be like this (Score:3, Insightful)
Make sure... (Score:2)
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oh for even a short window of opportunity delete function.
ROHS? (Score:2)
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Re:This is amusing (Score:4, Insightful)
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