Send your e-waste to China. No really, it might be good for the planet. (Sustainable Shanghai Day 4 part 3)

E-waste is one of those issues that makes me cringe from the inside out. I want that pretty new thing, and I don’t want to deal with the guilt associated with knowing that people are suffering from illnesses associated with deconstructing them after I throw them away. So I figured when in China, apply the Joanna Macy method of dealing with things we want to avoid, and look at the issue straight on. I had seen Laura Ling’s piece about Guiyu:

While I didn’t have time to make a visit for myself, I did the next best thing, and met up with Adam Minter at a local coffee shop. Adam went to China seven years ago, in part to report on what was happening in the Chinese recycling industry which, even then, was the number one importer of America’s recyclable wastes. Only thing, that was 7 years ago and he is still there, meeting with factory owners, visiting e-waste deconstruction camps and writing all about it on his blog www.shanghaiscrap.com.

A quick history lesson:… The global trade in e-waste started as far back as the 1970s, when the first wave of computers and other electronic appliances began to be retired in the developed world. Taiwan was a major destination for this material in the 1970s and 1980s, until an emerging environmental movement began to demand it be cleaned up. In the mid-1980s, several Taiwanese entrepreneurs set up e-waste recycling facilities in newly opened South China, nearby the country’s emerging electronics manufacturing facilities. The plants were dirty and dangerous, but they provided cheap raw materials to the emerging manufacturing sector. In the 80’s: China opened up to allow scrap to come in. The Basel Treaty prohibits transboundry shipment to other countries. Thanks to journalists around the world, we are aware of the e-waste saga.

But what if it makes common sense to send our e-waste to China? What if we examined a different story, one that’s not about avoiding dealing with our own trash, but rather being practical about returning the contents to it’s original source in the supply chain?

Leah Lamb: Can you explain how recycling works in China?
Adam Minter: There are roughly 10 million scrap peddlers in China running a quasi public/private business. Everything goes into the trash, since it gets sorted in the building or by recyclers in the neighborhood. Done with your electronics? Call the door man and he will have a scrap peddler at your door in minutes to bargain the worth of your TV and weigh your cardboard. The items are then packaged and sent to Jiangsu provence. Recycling is not a green business and has nothing to do with the environment. It’s a commodity business. For example, lets talk about plastics. Where it ends up depends on it’s grade. It’s good for plastics to return to China because there the supply chain in China needs plastic. Auto tail plastic lights return to China because they make it here and are expensive to produce. On the flip side, a water bottle is manufactured in the US, and so it is flaked and melted in the US.

LL: Activist organizations are saying we shouldn’t be sending e-waste to China~ what’s your take?
AM: “Well, the global environmental community continues to promote the notion that third world e-waste processing plants are the result of first world exports of waste. But that’s preposterous: China is the world’s second largest PC market. Where do all of those computers go? India is one of the world’s fastest growing e-waste markets. Where do all of those computers used in call centers go? Talk to BAN or other organizations working on these issues, and they downplay the issue, claiming that their “sources” indicate that foreign exports of e-waste are at record levels. But this tests credibility: all other grades of scrap recyclable exports have declined over the last two years due to the global economic crisis. So how is it that e-waste has increased?

The environmental community would do well to wake up to that fact. The willfully ignorant belief on the part of some in the activist community that China is incapable of generating its own e-waste and environmental problems smacks of willful ignorance, a political agenda, and a colonial mentality. I have no patience for it.”

LL: China wants US waste, and it makes sense for it to come here because the supply chain is here.

AM: China needs raw materials, and the labor is cheap enough to get people to do the work. A classic example of this is the air conditioner: the first thing you need to do to recycle it is pull out the compressor. But no one in the US or Europe will do that.
It is a complicated process to dismantle motors and the steel mill’s can’t handle contamination. Our copper factories benefit from an e-waste exchange: those electric motors are given away at 35 cents a pound and sent at the rate of a 20 ton shipping container. They are purchased in China for a huge profit and then farmers are paid minimally to dismantle them. As we speak, in Taizhou, there is a factory the size of 6 soccer fields buildings filled with motors. Meanwhile, US’a method of recycling computers is to shred them.”

LL: What’s your take on Laura Ling’s coverage of ewaste?
AM: For the record: Even if the United States ceased to exist tomorrow, China would remain the world’s largest e-waste recycler for years to come. This is based on a number of factors:

1. China is the world’s second largest PC and consumer electronics market and, by extension, the world’s second largest generator of e-waste. That e-waste remains in China; it is not exported.

2. Guiyu continues to exist not because of local corruption, but because China lacks environmentally sound e-waste recycling options AND officials in Beijing have made the conscious decision to allow Guiyu to continue operating until something better is developed and implemented. That “something” is currently in the works, but it’s going to take time.

3. The reason that e-waste stays in China and flows into China is 100% market-oriented: China’s PC and electronics manufacturers are the largest consumers of the metals recovered from e-waste. If China didn’t manufacture so much electronic equipment, that e-waste would flow/go elsewhere. The biggest spur to developing better e-waste recycling facilities is as much a matter of engineering better metal recoveries as it is environmental.

So it begs to question, does it make sense to send our e-waste to China? The supply chain is there, labor costs are affordable (aka cheap) and people there are willing and have the skills to dismantle what most people in developing nations refuse to handle. Either way, at the end of the day, garbage is messy.

You can follow Adam on via his blog, www.shanghaiscrap.com, or on Twitter.