John Vidal reports in today's Guardian on the "Poisonous detritus of the electronic revolution".
Apparently thousands of tonnes of potentially toxic computer waste is being shipped out of the UK to Africa and Asia every year.
From the article:
"The groups... identified a town called Guiyu, some 200 miles north-east of Hong Kong, where up to 100,000 migrant labourers break up and reprocess obsolete computers from around the world.
"The work involves men, women and children unaware of the health and environmental hazards of dismantling such goods - processes that include the open burning of plastics and wires, acid used to extract gold, the melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of toxic lead-laden cathode ray tubes."
"Already Guiyu has become so polluted that well water is undrinkable and water has to be trucked in for the entire population, the report said."
The article also lists the makeup of your typical 60lb desktop machine: including more than 6kg of plastics, 1.7kg of lead, 6.8kg of silica, 3.86kg of aluminium and trace amounts of substances including manganese, arsenic and mercury.
