Information provided/Greenpeace Photography/Bai Ling Greenpeace Executive/Li? Hundreds of rivers are pitch black due to heavy metal content; piles of electronic waste and blocked streets can be seen everywhere. Get on a large vehicle that is loading and unloading garbage; outside the town, the abandoned fields have become various garbage dumps, often billowing black smoke that covers the sky and emitting a disgusting pungent smell. Smell... This is not a description of the end of the world, but an everyday scene in Guiyu, an ordinary town in the Chaoshan region of southern China.
First impression of Guiyu: a prosperous land and a polluted town
Guiyu is located in Chaonan District, Shantou City, Guangdong Province, covering an area of ??52.4 square kilometers and a permanent population of 150,000. It is located in the center of a low-lying land on the west bank of Lianjiang River in eastern Guangdong. This terrain makes Guiyu a serious waterlogging area, and agricultural production is basically unsafe. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, due to the local geographical advantages, Guiyu developed a developed water channel and became one of the waterway hubs in Chaoshan area. This is also the origin of the name "Guiyu". At that time, the development of waterways provided Guiyu people with many employment opportunities and sources of income other than agriculture. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, with the expansion of roads and the abandonment of waterways, Guiyu people completely lost these advantages and opportunities.
Faced with the heavy pressure of life, the only feasible way is to give full play to the tradition of Chaoshan people doing business. The choice of Guiyu people is to buy old scrap products. In the first half of the 20th century, farmers in Guiyu Town began to walk around the streets in neighboring areas to buy chicken feathers, scrap copper and iron, etc. The acquisition of scrap products has gradually become another major local business. By the 1980s, the number of Guiyu people engaged in the purchase of scraps made Guiyu very famous in the Chaoshan area. As long as Guiyu people are mentioned, the first reaction of Chaoshan people is: collecting junk.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Guiyu Town began to engage in the dismantling business of old hardware and electrical appliances. Due to the huge profits, the scale of the entire industry gradually expanded. At the same time, foreign electronic waste It enters Guiyu on a large scale through transshipment points in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Nanhai. The traditional recycling industry has truly developed into the main business of Guiyu people.
After more than ten years of development of the garbage dismantling industry, Guiyu has now become a prosperous town. You can see a large number of new buildings in the area - these are called "Tiger Downhill" "" style houses are very expensive to build; various imported cars with local license plates are speeding on the road; several main streets are as prosperous as small towns in the economically developed areas of the Pearl River Delta; several large-scale supermarkets show that Guiyu People’s purchasing power; the price level is higher than that in Guangzhou, which also illustrates the economic income level of Guiyu people from one aspect.
Guiyu, which has become affluent, is also a place where life is extremely inconvenient. The poor ecological environment makes the first thing you do when you first arrive in Guiyu is to adapt to the local air. There, you often have shortness of breath due to the sudden pungent smell. At the same time, people still have to drink bottled mineral water, and most of the local surface water and shallow groundwater are no longer drinkable. One of the local sights is that you can see water trucks running around from time to time. The water is transported from Chendian, 9 kilometers away, and it immediately changes from 1.5 yuan/ton to 1 to 2 yuan/barrel (40 liters). The water transport industry has become one of the important local industries.
The ecological crisis caused by recycling electronic waste
What exactly is the reason for such a bad ecological environment in Guiyu?
The culprit turned out to be electronic waste!
Relevant data shows that discarded e-waste contains rich recyclable materials, including precious metals, plastics, glass and some reusable parts. According to foreign research reports, 1 ton of electronic boards can separate 286 pounds of copper, 1 pound of gold, and 44 pounds of tin. Only 1 pound of gold is worth US$6,000. Therefore, no advanced technology, equipment, or cost is required to process these electronic waste. Hand dismantling is very profitable. Due to the characteristics of the electronics industry and its neglect of environmental recycling issues in the production and design process, the cost of scrap recycling is extremely high. At the same time, global resource shortages have made e-waste recycling very profitable. Therefore, given the existence of various loopholes in international trade, it is easy for electronic waste from developed countries to flow to developing countries, and international waste transfers will occur and intensify year by year.
For example, 80% of the e-waste generated by the United States, the world's largest consumer of electronic products, is packed into containers and exported to India, China and Pakistan, of which China accounts for 90%. But correspondingly, China currently does not even have a real e-waste processing company. Basically, these smuggled e-waste flows into some handicraft workshops along the coast of Guangdong and Fujian and is illegally dismantled.
The electronic waste flowing into China is not only large in quantity but also seriously harmful. Especially products such as televisions, computers, mobile phones, and stereos contain large amounts of toxic and harmful substances. For example, TV picture tubes, cathode ray tubes, solder on printed circuit boards and plastic casings are all toxic substances. Computers contain more harmful substances. More than 700 chemical raw materials are needed to manufacture a computer, more than 50% of which are harmful to the human body. The average lead content in a computer monitor alone reaches more than 1 kilogram. During the processing of electronic waste, inhalation of tin, lead, dioxin bromide, beryllium, cadmium and mercury will cause toxic hazards to workers and nearby residents; lead, barium and other heavy metals seep into the ground and will pollute groundwater; direct dumping Hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and bromides in rivers and on their banks can acidify rivers and harm fish and plants.
The small town of Guiyu came into people’s sight with such scars.
The first to suffer are workers on the front lines of the recycling industry. In Guiyu’s e-waste dismantling industry, circuit board processing in Beilin and plastic pellet raw material production in Longgang are the ones that cause the greatest harm to workers’ health. Outsiders work hard in these heavily polluted factories and workshops, often without necessary protection and purification measures. Beilin circuit board recycling process is to bake the integrated circuit board directly on the fire. After the circuit board is heated and softened, the various chips, capacitors on the circuit board and the tin on the solder joints behind are removed with pliers. When the circuit board is heated and softened, it will release pungent and unpleasant gases - which is why the pungent smell that fills the streets in Beilin area is generated.
Longgang’s plastic recycling and processing industry can be regarded as the backbone of Guiyu’s e-waste dismantling industry in terms of scale and output value. However, even in the factories and workshops of this pillar industry, the most primitive production methods are still used. After the plastic is cleaned and before it is processed and pelletized, due to the lack of corresponding identification equipment, workers need to light the sample plastic and smell the smell to identify the type of plastic, such as whether it is flame retardant, whether it contains formaldehyde, etc. Smelling this kind of plastic burning gas for a long time will definitely cause harm to the body.
Despite such a harsh production environment and harsh labor treatment, some basic principles of local businessmen still provide basic protection and reasons for a large number of outsiders to stay in the local area. Guiyu people have inherited the business tradition of Chaoshan: they attach great importance to the principle of integrity. As long as the boss and the workers negotiate a price, in most cases, the local boss will pay the workers wages on time and monthly. In the local area, you can often hear complaints about local bosses beating and scolding migrant workers, but it is rare to hear them complain about bosses delaying or withholding wages. With the prevailing culture of dishonesty in the entire society, the most basic employment principle of being able to receive wages as agreed in advance has become the biggest reason for migrant workers to stay in Guiyu.
The power background behind e-waste
After more than 10 years of development, Guiyu’s e-waste dismantling industry has formed an industrial operation scale, with 80% of local families involved. It has become Guiyu’s pillar industry and the most important source of income for local residents. And outsiders have become the most basic node in the dismantling industry.
Since the raw materials used in Guiyu’s e-waste dismantling industry have been imported from the beginning, and e-waste is a sensitive cargo, the transaction has become very secretive. The reason why Guiyu has been able to develop steadily in the e-waste dismantling industry over the years is directly related to the well-developed local clan organizations and strong social network.
The development process of Nanyang is a good example: Due to the strict supervision of the government, less and less electronic waste can be successfully entered through customs, and goods are obtained from the traditional source locations of Nanhai and Guangzhou. Returning also faces strict scrutiny. Through the huge clan network, Nanyang Township found some stable suppliers of the same clan in Nanhai and other places, and managed to get the highway supervision department to let them go. This tight network allowed Nanyang to rise rapidly.
Not only that, the regional distribution characteristics of Guiyu’s e-waste dismantling industry are also closely related to clan power.
In Guiyu, every clan has a strong tendency to help each other internally and to unite externally. Under this tendency, families of the same clan will naturally help each other, provide information to each other in economic activities, and even conduct business activities in the form of partnerships. At the same time, they kept secrets from people outside the clan and even deliberately prevented people from other clans from engaging in the same business to avoid intensifying competition. The result is that economic production is clustered according to clan units, forming very obvious dismantled production areas.
The reason is that after all, Guiyu is a small town with a newly developed commercial system. It does not have a complete commercial credit system, and its commercial operations basically continue the traditional "acquaintance economic model." For example, a certain plastic collection and crushing workshop may only supply a few plastic raw material production workshops because they are familiar with each other. This kind of trust does not require a special credit authentication process between them. At the same time, in terms of delivery time, cash flow and production process Cooperate with each other. Due to the long history of fighting between clans in Guiyu, trust between different clans is weak, while trust between members of the same clan is very easy to establish. Therefore, Guiyu's internal production organization is naturally affected by clan relations, which is also an important reason why Guiyu's e-waste dismantling industry is concentrated in regions based on clan production...