Chinese Officials Baffled by 60 Minutes eWaste Report
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:59
Last year, you may remember the 60 minutes report 60 Minutes Covers eWaste in China where they followed a container of ewaste from the US to Guiyi China.
Interesting enough, according to the article Recycling Nation’s Recyclers , the 60 minutes crew may have got their facts a bit wrong:
The report was amazing to local officials because many of the practices it exposed had been outlawed since 2005.
Also, it wasn’t Guiyu.
“Guiyu has been dealing with the pollution problem since 2000. These efforts were re-doubled in 2005, when Guiyu was named a ‘pilot town’ for recycling by the National Development and Reform Commission,” Lian Wuming, head of the Guiyu township government, told China Business Weekly last week. “These effort have paid off,” he said.
Further:
No one denies that Guiyu, Puning, and many other villages involved in the recycling business are polluted. “The current pollution problem is caused by the treatment of e-waste in primitive household workshops, dating back to the 1980s,” Lian said.
He conceded that some such workshops “are still illegally extracting precious metals in a very simple and backward way,” but said that last year alone, the town shut down 80 workshops and prosecuted 400 cases of illegal burning.
So, what happened? did the 60 minutes crew/ producers get the town wrong? Are village officials trying to cover up, or “clear” up the facts?
IT is an interesting twist, and the rest of the article is itself quite interesting – and I urge you to read it. I am particularly curious about the potential link between the falloff in the economy, and the current lack of activity in guiyi.
Consumers don’t upgrade their electronics are put off, the demand for metals is clearly off, and many of those shops which were running on fumes (literally and figuratively) have more than likely met their organizational demise.
So, what is the real story? Who knows, but it is clear that whether or not the producers got the name right, the fact is that right now there is an opportunity to clean up the remaining mom and pop shops by investing in them and bringing them up so that when the flotilla of waste reaches them they are ready
