Chinese Peasants Poisoning Themselves

Ever wonder what happens to old PC’s, TV sets and other discarded electronics?  They often get shipped to China where the Chinese peasants poison themselves to recover bits of valuable metals and chemicals.  Ah, the wonders of the glorious worker’s paradise!

 
Mountains of keyboards piled in a Chinese town.

From the AP here:

The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.
 
China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers.

The results are visible on the streets of Guiyu, where the e-waste industry employs an estimated 150,000 people. Shipping containers of computer parts, old video games, computer screens, cell phones and electronics of all kinds, from ancient to nearly new, are dumped onto the streets and sorted for dismantling and melting.

Valuable metals such as copper, gold, and silver are removed through melting and acid baths, while steel is torn out for scrap and plastic is ground into pellets for other use.

In the town of Nanyang, a few minutes drive from Guiyu, a middle-aged couple from the inland province of Hunan sorts wiring in a mud-floored shack. Such work, including melting down motherboards, earns them about $100 per month.

Many houses double as smelter and home. Gas burners shaped like blacksmith’s forges squat beside the front doors, their flues rising several stories to try to dissipate the toxic smoke.

Nonetheless, a visitor soon develops a throbbing headache and metallic taste in the mouth. The groundwater has long been too polluted for human consumption.

Chemicals, including mercury, fluorine, barium, chromium, and cobalt, that either leach from the waste or are used in processing, are blamed for skin rashes and respiratory problems. Contamination can take decades to dissipate, experts say, and long-term health effects can include kidney and nervous system damage, weakening of the immune system and cancer.

I thought that the communists take care of their workers?  How could they be so careless about their health and the environment?  And that throbbing headache and metallic taste?  That’s the first symptoms of metal fume fever.  Next will be the onset of chronic recurring fevers due to inhalation of heavy metals like cobalt and chromium.