China's Notorious E-Waste Village Disappears Almost Overnight
China E-Waste
Guiyu, once the “e-waste capital of the world,” has been cleared out almost overnight as China’s war on pollution forces its 3,000 informal e-waste workshops to close or relocate.
Just days after the Dec. 1 order for all 3,000 remaining unregulated electronic-waste workshops to move to a newly built industrial park or face power cuts, the visual reminders of Guiyu are largely absent. Gone are the trucks loaded beyond capacity with old cathode-ray tube televisions and boulder-size burlap bags overflowing with printed circuit boards.
Guiyu, the village in eastern Guangdong province known infamously for over a decade as the “e-waste capital of the world,” is now a ghost town. At its height the town hosted 5,000 or more informal e-waste workshops and dismantling facilities. Just a couple of years ago more than 1.6 million metric tons of e-waste passed through Guiyu annually, with extraction of precious metals, plastics and other reusable parts generating more than $800 million a year.
“The place is dead. Boarded up,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, during a visit as the transformation sank in. The clearance comes as China moves toward better regulating electronic waste as it becomes a domestic rather than imported problem.
By 2017, China is expected to be the biggest e-waste producer in the world, outpacing the U.S. A study by the United Nations University put the global total of e-waste discarded at 41.8 million metric tons in 2014, with only around 6 million tons recycled by licensed processors.
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