Where does America’s E-waste end up? > 자유게시판

• 목록
• 답변
• 글쓰기
• 게시판 리스트 옵션
  • 수정
  • 삭제

High above the Pacific Ocean in a aircraft headed for Hong Kong, most of the passengers are fast asleep. But not Jim Puckett. His eyes are fixed on the glowing screen of his laptop. Little orange markers dot a satellite picture. He squints at the pixelated terrain trying to make out telltale indicators. He’s searching for America’s electronic waste. "People have the correct to know the place their stuff goes," he says. Dead electronics make up the world’s fastest-rising source of waste. The United States produces more e-waste than any nation on the planet. Electronics include toxic materials like lead and mercury, which might harm the environment and folks. Americans send about 50,000 dump trucks worth of electronics to recyclers every year. But a two-yr investigation by the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based e-waste watchdog group, concluded that sometimes businesses are exporting electronics slightly than recycling them. Puckett’s group partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to place 200 geolocating monitoring units inside previous computer systems, TVs and printers.

A Basel Action Network worker places a GPS tracker inside a broken printer. "The trackers are like miniature cell telephones," he mentioned. About a 3rd of the tracked electronics went overseas - some so far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 iTagPro tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and ItagPro Oregon. The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, iTagPro official Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong. It’s the identical route Puckett is taking now. The next morning Puckett follows the little orange markers to a area of Hong Kong known as the brand new Territories, an extended-time agricultural area along the border with mainland China that’s shifted toward business in latest many years. He groups up with a Chinese journalist and iTagPro tracker translator, Dongxia Su, and a neighborhood driver, who will help navigate the area.

They follow a set of GPS coordinates for one of the tracked electronics. Paved streets turn into rutted dirt roads. They pass a gradual stream of trucks carrying delivery containers from the port. Dongxia Su and Jim Puckett peek over the fence of an e-waste scrapyard in the brand new Territories of Hong Kong. As they strategy their first vacation spot - "One-hundred ft away. Eighty ft. Seventy-seven ft," Puckett says - they hear sounds of energy drills and shattering glass. It’s coming from the opposite aspect of a high metal wall made from outdated shipping containers. "It should be on this yard right here," Puckett says, pointing towards the fence. Su pounds on the entrance gate, and the drilling stops. A worker shouts from beyond the fence and Su tells him the group is searching for used electronics. She says they wish to fill a delivery container with printers to refurbish and iTagPro tracker promote in Pakistan. Inside, workers are dismantling LCD TVs.

The bottom at their feet is littered with damaged white tubes. These fluorescent lamps were made to light up flat-screens. When they break they release invisible mercury vapor. Even a minuscule quantity of mercury is usually a neurotoxin. The employees aren’t sporting protective face masks. One worker says he isn’t aware of the risks. "He had no thought," Su says, after talking with him in Mandarin. The new Territories used to serve solely as a pass-through for smuggled e-waste, Puckett mentioned, where staff would unload delivery containers and put electronics on smaller trucks sure for mainland China. But a crackdown by the Chinese authorities on entire electronic imports, iTagPro tracker part of a border control operation referred to as "Green Fence," has prevented many electronics from moving throughout the border. "Now they’re doing the processing here," he stated. Puckett has been investigating the afterlife of client electronics for nearly two a long time. Through the years, iTagPro tracker his workforce staked out U.S.

In 2002, iTagPro tracker the Basel Action Network’s Jim Puckett exams the water quality close to Guiyu, China, where residents cooked electronics to extract valuable metals and dumped the leftovers in a nearby river. Many U.S. shoppers obtained their first glimpse of what occurs to their discarded electronics in Puckett’s 2001 film "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia." It captured the crude recycling methods going down in Guiyu, a cluster of villages in southeastern China that has since develop into recognized as the world’s biggest graveyard for America’s electronic junk. In the video, villagers desoldered circuit boards over coal-fired grills, burned plastic casings off wires to extract copper, and mined gold by soaking computer chips in black swimming pools of hydrochloric acid. WATCH: What is e-waste? Puckett’s documentary got here out more than a decade after almost every developed nation on the globe had ratified the Basel Convention, iTagPro tracker an international treaty to cease developed nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer nations.