China’s E-Scrap Nightmare Just Isn’t What It Used to Be.
On May 4, 2007, Jeffrey Weidenhamer and Michael L. Clement of Ashland University in Ohio published “Leaded electronic waste is a possible source material for lead-contaminated jewelry” in Chemosphere, a scientific journal “related to the environment and human health.” The paper is technical, but the hypothesis it attempts to prove is straightforward. According to the authors, if their data is correct, then: “recycled circuit board solders are being used to produce some of the heavily leaded imported jewelry sold in the United States.”
I won’t go into the details of the analysis, but suffice it to say that the authors’ lab purchased and tested the chemical components of toy jewelery manufactured in China, and sold in the United States, and compared it to lead solder samples collected from an e-scrap workshop in Taizhou, Zhejiang, by Greenpeace and a US advocacy group. Weidenhamer and Clement’s paper concluded with this modest suggestion:
The global trade in lead includes not only leaded products imported from China such as the jewelry examined in this study, but also large quantities of e-waste that are exported from the United States to a number of poorer nations, including China. This waste represents a large potential source of lead for use in other materials.
Potential, not actual. On June 26, 2007, Weidenhamer and Clement published a second paper, “Evidence of recycling of lead battery waste into highly leaded jewelry,” also in Chemosphere. In this paper, the authors tested Chinese-manufactured jewelery for lead levels and concluded: “some battery lead is being recycled into highly leaded jewelry items.”
They write:
The source materials for these jewelry items are unknown … One potential source of scrap lead is the large quantity of e-waste that is exported from the United States to a number of poorer nations, including China.
Potential, not actual. That said, there’s a small problem here: exporting batteries to China is far less profitable than sending them to a US-based battery recycler. That’s why nobody does it. Weidenhamer and Clement could have figured this out with a simple phone call, and that would have eliminated the need to imply that US battery scrap exports are a source of leaded Chinese jewelery. Still, no harm done. The claims were modest, and where they weren’t backed up, they were couched in qualifiers – as they should be in a scientific journal that requires rigorous proof.
But then the scientific caution, the modesty and – above all – the qualifiers began to fall by the wayside.
On July 11, 2007, the Basel Action Network [BAN - a US-based non-profit devoted to halting the "trans-boundary" shipment of hazardous waste from developed to developing nations, issued a press release under the title:
Research Identifies U.S. Electronic Waste as Likely Source of Toxic Jewelry Imports from China
The press release concerns the Weidenhamer and Clement papers --- even though the papers were quite explicit in their acknowledgment that the source of the leaded material was unknown. In fact, the papers didn't even try, because - as Weidenhamer and Clement surely know - there's absolutely no way to distinguish lead solder imported into Taizhou from the United States, from lead solder that was trucked down to Zhejiang after being purchased in front of my Shanghai apartment building. That is, there is no way to tell without tracing the lead from the Yiwu workshop, to the e-scrap recycling shop where it was processed, and then - finally - back to the shipper, and the shipper's source. Without doing that - without tracing the source - the only possible conclusion is a geographically non-specific one.
Weidenhamer and Clement didn't consider the origins of the lead contamination in their papers, and thus their papers avoid assigning the blame for the lead contaminated toys to US e-scrap. But when it comes time to promote their papers to the press, via BAN's press release, Dr. Weidenhamer forgets his careful qualifiers:
Unfortunately, this appears to be a case of us reaping what we have sown ... Recent news paints a picture that China is exporting all kinds of horrors to us, yet our research suggests that we are part of a circle of poison - with our own hazardous waste not only harming the Chinese, but also being recycled into products coming back to harm our children. If so, we must take responsibility to halt these hazardous waste exports.
Of course, there is nothing in Weidenhamer's research to suggest a "circle of poison." In fact, the research acknowledges ignorance about the source of the contaminants in question. As Weidenhamer surely knows, he must acknowledge ignorance because there are no reliable statistics on just how much e-scrap the developed world ships to China, or how much China inflicts on itself through the recycling of its own e-scrap.
There are, however, unreliable statistics about the volume of that waste, and due to the fact that those are the only statistics available, they've been echoing around the media for years, taking on the cloak of reliability. For those who follow this trade, the number is familiar: the US ships roughly 80% of its e-scrap to China (for examples of the use and abuse of 80%, see here, here, here, here, and here)
The number has always been spurious, but even if it had been true, six years of policy and economic developments have rendered it totally out of date. It's worth examining the origins, especially in light of the Weidenhamer and Clement papers.
In 2002, BAN released a landmark report and film, "Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia," which is surely one of the most important and influential environmental documents of the last decade. It is no exaggeration to say that BAN's film not only brought the issue of e-scrap exports to the world's attention, it also played an important role in pushing the Chinese government into a long-term program to clean up its imported e-scrap problem. Since then, the situation in China's imported e-scrap centers has improved markedly (especially in Taizhou). But for all of the report's successes, it suffers from one marked failure: on the basis of "very knowledgable and informed industry sources," the report claims that 80% of US e-scrap is shipped to China. Who are these very knowledgable and informed industry sources?
Footnote 41 reveals "them" as "Telephone Interview with Mike Magliaro, Life-Cycle Business Partners."
That's it. That's all. That's the basis for "80%."
So who is Life Cycle? According to the company website, they are "a leading provider of end-of-use technology asset management and recovery services" that focuses on "helping technology manufacturers and large corporations dispose of inactive, obsolete, and surplus electronics equipment." In other words, Life Cycle competes for recovery services with US-based exporters of e-scrap to China. I have no doubt in Mike Magliaro's sincerity, but the truth is that - as a responsible environmental steward, and a strategic competitor to the illegal trade - he is hardly the best person to be estimating the actual volume of material flowing to China. At a minimum, BAN would have been well-advised to talk to more people. I've been reporting on this trade for more than five years, and I have no problem finding people who give widely varying accounts of the amount of US e-scrap shipped to China (because, again, nobody knows). However, on one item, they all agree: China's contribution to its e-scrap nightmare is growing, and significantly larger than what the developed world exports to China. And the data is available. For example, in April, Liu Fuzhong, Deputy Director General of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association told the China International Recycling Conference in Tianjin that China throws away 120 million electrical appliances annually (strictly defined as computers, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and PCs).
And that's exactly what I told Scott Tong, the National Public Radio reporter who contacted me in regard to Weidenhamer and Clement's studies on August 13. It was an off-record conversation (and now it's not), but the gist was that the study was good, and the spin was bad. I told Tong that - if he really wants to do this story - he'd be well-advised to go to an e-scrap site and take a close look at the e-scrap to determine whether or not it originated in the United States. On November 14, Tong's story was broadcast on NPR's Marketplace program. It included this passage:
Workers sift through six-foot-high piles of electronic trash, or "e-waste": circuit boards, monitors, keyboards, and smashed-up cell phones. Most of this stuff is Chinese waste. But I also found imported trash from the developed world -- based on the power plugs and the foreign characters on the keyboards.
So far as I know, Tong is the first reporter to take BAN's press release and the Weidenhamer studies and ask whether, in fact, the waste in question was sourced in the US. It's an essential question when reporting on these subjects because - truth be told - without asking, it's impossible to tell imported from domestically generated e-scrap. Case in point: below, two photos. One shows a Chinese e-scrap workshop devoted to domestic scrap; the other shows a Chinese e-scrap workshop devoted to imported scrap. Now, which is the imported workshop, and which is the domestic one?
[I'll provide the answer at the end of this post.]
My point being: just because you see Chinese people next to a pile of e-scrap does not mean that you can automatically assume that the material originated in the US. You can’t, and you really shouldn’t.
To his credit, Scott Tong is one of the first Western reporters to realize this:
[Tong] Jim Puckett’s Basel Action Network helped coordinate the study — he says what comes around, goes around.
Puckett: This very waste that we’re sending to China comes back and poisons our own.
[Tong] It’s impossible to know for sure if the recycled lead came from America, or Japan or China. But Puckett’s main point is hazardous e-trash changes hands in the global economy far too easily, into a shadowy global supply chain of smugglers, wholesalers and backyard operators.
Except that – in China, at least – there’s nothing the least bit shadowy about the e-trash trade. It occurs on nearly every street corner in every big city, it’s huge, and it’s not at all difficult to follow the trade to its ultimate processing sites. For organizations like BAN, advocates like Puckett, and other organizations constitutionally committed to the cause of preventing developed countries from shipping hazardous waste to developing ones, this creates a bit of problem. What if – as seems increasingly likely in China – the developing country is producing more of its own e-waste than it is importing from the developed world?
In mid-November, the AP’s Christopher Bodeen published “China’s E-Waste Nightmare Worsening,” [the story ran under different titles in different publications]. The story opens in Guiyu, China’s most notorious e-scrap processing zone:
For five years, environmentalists and the media have highlighted the danger to Chinese workers who dismantle much of the world’s junked electronics. Yet a visit to this southeastern Chinese town regarded as the heartland of “e-waste” disposal shows little has improved. In fact, the problem is growing worse because of China’s own contribution.
Two points to make here. First, Guiyu has not always been the “heartland” of China’s e-waste business. But because it was the focus of BAN’s 2002 film and report, it is the place where most journalists go if they are writing an e-waste story. Most, but not all. In 2003, some media – with the help of BAN – discovered that Taizhou, in Zhejiang Province, had an even larger – and dirtier! – e-scrap processing sector than Guiyu. And then something funny happened: Taizhou’s local government, with prodding from Beijing, began to clean itself up, and today it’s difficult (though still possible) to find imported e-scrap being processed in the Taizhou area. Weidenhamer and Clement, who sourced their solder samples in Taizhou, never acknowledge this fact in their paper. In any case, Bodeen rightly acknowledges that China’s own domestic e-scrap is beginning to make a contribution:
China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. 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, according to Choi.
“Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise,” he said.
Choi doesn’t cite her source for this estimate, but whatever the source, the Greenpeace number is much smaller than Liu Fuzhong’s estimate of 120 million pieces of Chinese e-scrap generated annually. Liu doesn’t include mobile phones in his estimate, and Greenpeace doesn’t include air conditioners. So, even though air-consditioners are heavier than mobile phone, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Greenpeace is right, and 30 million pieces of e-scrap weigh “more than 1 million ton.” Then, using Liu’s number, 120 million pieces of domestically generated e-scrap must weight weigh more than 4 million ton.
If, for some reason, China decided to load this purported 4 million ton of waste into shipping containers, it would fill roughly 183,000 TEU, meaning 183,000 twenty-foot shipping containers (assuming full containers). Today, the world’s largest shipping container vessel, the Maersk Emma, is capable of carrying roughly 11,000 TEUs. So, in short, China would need to charter sixteen of these 397m x 56m behemoths to transport what the China Household Electrical Appliances Association (not Greenpeace, which has a smaller claim!) claims that China generates, annually, in e-scrap. That’s a whole lot, but when you consider the scale of China’s economic development over the last twenty years, and what’s being thrown away on street corners, daily, it’s probably not enough.
If China needs four of the world’s largest ships to hold its e-waste, then how many actual ships are being utilized by the developed world to ship its e-waste to China? This is not a theoretical question, if you go by Greenpeace’s claim that the developed world is still the source of “most” of China’s e-scrap. Of course, “most” is vague. But for argument’s sake, let’s say that “most” means that 75% of China’s e-scrap is imported. That would then require more than 48 Maersk Emma sized ships, and by volume, this would render e-scrap one of the leading exports, by volume, from the developed world to China – even exceeding most agricultural products and the combined volume of the legal scrap recyclables trade. I have been to ports all over China, and I must say, I have never seen any evidence to suggest such a scale. Has anyone else?
My point here is not to ridicule BAN or Greenpeace. They have done ground-breaking and fundamental work that – unlike many advocacy campaigns – has actually helped to change China for the better. They deserve accolades and more. But I do think it is well past time that those who campaign against the shipment of e-scrap to China give up the image of China as passive victim to a neo-colonialist trade. To be sure, China is not a developed country, but it is developed enough to be generating enormous quantities of waste that dwarf what the West is capable of sending to its shores. At the same time, there are other, less developed countries that have – over the last several years – become new, preferred destinations for imported e-scrap (in part because China has successfully barred large amounts of imported e-scrap that used to arrive in Taizhou and elsewhere). Shifting things around isn’t an improvement, in a global sense. But in a local sense, China should rightly take pride in the fact that it is rapidly losing its reputation as a global dumping ground (while, at the same time, becoming a dumping ground for its own waste).
The January issue of National Geographic includes “High Tech Trash,” a superb overview of the global e-waste trade written by Chris Carroll (full disclosure: I provided some background for Carroll’s article). Rightly, the story opens in Africa with a scene of e-scrap-related environmental degradation that was quite commonplace in China only five years ago (and still is, in some places). This is not new news: Africa has been known as an alternative destination for e-scrap for much of the last decade. But recent Chinese crackdowns have made it a more attractive one over the last three years (despite high shipping costs). At the same time, China has an imported scrap trade, and Carroll went looking for it:
On a recent trip to Taizhou, a city in Zhejiang Province south of Shanghai that was another center of e-waste processing, I saw evidence of both the crackdown and its limits. Until a few years ago, the hill country outside Taizhou was the center of a huge but informal electronics disassembly industry that rivaled Guiyu’s. But these days, customs officials at the nearby Haimen and Ningbo ports—clearinghouses for massive volumes of metal scrap—are sniffing around incoming shipments for illegal hazardous waste.
The scene, as described, is accurate (I’ve been there recently) and couldn’t be much more different than the one described by Christopher Bodeen in his story for the AP. It also couldn’t be more damaging to Weidenhamer and Clement: after all, they sourced their lead samples from Taizhou. Carroll continues:
High-tech scrap “imports here started in the 1990s and reached a peak in 2003,” says a high school teacher whose students tested the environment around Taizhou for toxics from e-waste. He requested anonymity from fear of local recyclers angry about the drop in business. “It has been falling since 2005 and now is hard to find.” Today the salvagers operate in the shadows … In Taizhou, at least, the e-waste business seems to be waning.
My only quibble here is with the modifier “at least.” Only five years ago, Taizhou was one of Asia’s largest e-scrap processing zones. Its decline is one of the great Chinese environmental success stories of the decade. Alas, some habits die hard, and the curious Dr. Weidenhamer appears at the end of Carroll’s article to make his most explicit argument yet that US e-scrap is returning to the US in the form of lead-contaminated products:
“The U.S. right now is shipping large quantities of leaded materials to China, and China is the world’s major manufacturing center,” Weidenhamer says. “It’s not all that surprising things are coming full circle and now we’re getting contaminated products back.”
It hardly bears repeating that Weidenhamer has no data to back up this claim. It is, after all, a claim that he did not make in his peer-reviewed papers. But it is a claim that – right or wrong – continues to resonate with journalists, activists, and politicians who really ought to know better. And it matters: at the request of Representative Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, the US government’s Government Accountability Office is currently putting together a study on US e-waste exports. How that turns out is anybody’s guess, but as the recent Chinese quality crisis has demonstrated, blame for contaminated Chinese exports has geopolitical implications. Toys made with American lead are going to be handled differently – politically, especially – than those made with Chinese lead. To be sure, the manufacturing is done in China. But as any experienced business executive in China will attest: it’s all about the sourcing.
[*answer to domestic/imported riddle: the top photo shows processing of domestically-generated e-scrap.]
——————-
For those who arrive at this post by googling for ways to dispose of your e-scrap at home (and there are usually a few of you when I blog e-scrap related posts), click over to BAN’s e-stewards program. There you’ll find a list of e-recyclers who operate according to a rigorous set of environmental and social justice criteria. It’s a laudable program.]
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Great (very long) post, Adam. Why didn’t you publish this somewhere? I’m guessing you won’t be welcome at Ashland U after this
Anyway I think it’s really interesting that the very people who depict e-scrap exports to China as a sort of neo-colonialist revival have their own neo-colonialist tendencies. You avoid saying so directly but I think its pretty clear that BAN Greenpeace and the rest of them view China as this benign helpfless victim, and that’s just as much a part of the neo-colonialist mindset as what they accuse the exporters of having. Neither side views China as an equal.
Comment by Kevin1971 — January 14, 2008 @ 11:08 am
excellent article Adam, just a quick correction.. Jamie Choi of Greenpeace here in Beijing is a “she”
Comment by Terry — January 14, 2008 @ 11:37 am
Terry – thanks for the correction. I’ve made the change in the text.
Comment by Adam — January 14, 2008 @ 11:48 am
Denial is a River in….China?
Adam seems to paint himself as having the definitive word on the topic of Chinese waste trade despite it being a very challenging subject — a many headed hydra which I don’t think anyone fully understands. He questions BAN’s objectivity as a non-profit watchdog organization, when it is well known that while a freelancer, Adam sells many of his stories to the International Scrap Recyclers Institute’s (ISRI) Scrap magazine and and other industrial trade journals which would like to ignore the moral and environmental implications of the scrap trade. ISRI for example has opposed the Basel Convention and the Basel Ban Amendment and BAN and Greenpeace for as long as we have worked on curtailing the trade in hazardous waste. To this day ISRI continues to oppose any restrictions on the free trade in hazardous waste as long as the word “recycling” is involved, however suspect that recycling is. I fear this is because ISRI’s membership holds both the social and environmental low-riders as well as the responsible businesses in its membership base. ISRI has always pressed hard for the lowest common denominator for socially and environmental rigor with respect to trade issues. While nobody can claim to have the definitive story on Chinese waste trade we fear that both the data and the motivation of this most recent article is suspect.
When I met Adam Minter in Shanghai in 2004 he had just travelled to Taizhou as part of an investigation for trade journalism, and he showed me his pictures and data he had gotten from an industry conference. However, in his investigation he had failed to discover the horrors I had found there in a quick field trip in the same month. While his past articles have proven to be informative while focused primarily on the positive aspects of global trade, this latest article appears to be intent on serving as an apologist for an ongoing horrific cyber-age nightmare the demise of which is sadly exagerated. The artilce appears intent on saying in so many words “not to worry” implying that China is now cleaning up its act and anyway far fewer amounts of e-waste is being imported and dumped in a manner which BAN has documented (see http://www.ban.org).
Our information is quite to the contrary. In fact I recently received another letter just last week, from the CEO of a prominent e-waste recycler in the US — Metech International, a company that processes much of Apple Computer’s waste, that argued against BAN on another basis, — that is, they believed the trade to China from the US was too massive/impossible to stop and that at any given time he said he knew that about 500 containers of e-waste sit in Hong Kong harbor awaiting transhipment to the mainland. We have gathered our own recent evidence that Metech’s statement regarding the volume of the trade is unfortunately likely to be true — although we disagree with his conclusion that we should forget trying to control it from the front end and throw in the towel.
Cursory research will reveal that many of the former hotspots, so easily found by journalists have been erased by government action. However more diligent research will show that the trade has not diminished but simply been pushed a little further under the carpet — farther and farther from the population centers like Taizhou and Guiyu and literally outsourced to the doorsteps of farmers all over these regions. Its easy to make a cosmetic clean up of hotspots but the effect of such government action is to simply push things further into the rural areas. Further, we have recent concrete proof of steady shipments exported each day to southern China (Hong Kong and Pearl River Delta ports) with frightening regularity. Nevertheless, despite the outsourcing, Guiyu is still the hottest of hotspots and it is all too obvious if one simply goes there and faces off against the threats of wary waste-bosses that this area is still receiving massive quantities of e-waste, virtually all of which is imported from North America.
Adam goes on to imply that we should not worry about the imports as it is impossible to tell the difference between imported waste and Chinese waste and that the amounts witnessed are likely due to domestic sources. While it is certainly true that China produces massive and increasing amounts of its own e-waste from domestic consumption, the statement that one cannot tell the difference is simply not true. It is not all that difficult to tell the difference and someone with purported knowledge of the trade should know better. Everything from how the waste is packaged, the types of plugs used, the asset tags, the repair stickers, format types, harddrive data, and the languages used on the equipment are all clear indicators of the original source.
Further our sources indicate that most of what is actually processed by the informal sector comes from imports. This is because the traded waste comes pre-collected and concentrated, when in fact organizing e-waste collection systems in a country like China for their own population is extremely challenging and is not yet operationally scaled to collect massive volumes as yet.
It is the import trade that allows the informal primitive recycling sector to thrive however diffused into the countryside. And as long as that sector is able to thrive economically, it is impossible for more expensive proper recycling to take root in China and thus unlikely that domestic waste will be managed any better than that which is imported.
Finally and most disturbing, Adam fails to note that if it were in fact true that China was successful in cracking down on the illegal imports, the nature of the global market and North American waste trade uniquely being virtually unregulated, would simply mean that the waste would be redirected elsewhere to places such as Africa. If China was really effective in curtailing the trade, does he really believe the exporters would simply all decide that export was no longer an option? Its a big world out there and there are a lot of desperate people to exploit. Would redirection to Africa be anything to brag about? Is that progress?
Adam fails to mention the global community effort via the Basel Convention to end global trade in hazardous waste — fails to recognise that this is a global shell game and a very unsustainable and counterproductive one at that.
Having said that, we must assert that while evidence does exist that a very significant waste stream is hitting the shores of West Africa (see our report The Digital Dump), it does not so far come even close to comparing to the evidence of flows to China. With no real data, however anyone can claim there is no proof found in figures. That was a problem we faced in 2002 and still face. Nevertheless we still stand by the estimates of “about 80%”, which we NEVER stated was based on hard data but a figure based on the polling of MANY recyclers, while however citing just one of these very credible individuals that agreed to assert this publicly.
We challenge anyone to conduct a similar polling of legitimate e-waste recyclers today in the US — we are certain they will state very clearly that between 50-80% of the e-waste collected for recycling in North America is in fact exported and most of that still goes to China. Each of these legitimate recyclers face brute competition and at times extinction from the competition of exporters on a daily basis — this is the most common knowledge within the industry and apologist articles to the contrary belie what every US recycler knows to be a sad fact.
Sincerely,
Jim Puckett, coordinator BAN
Comment by Jim Puckett — January 15, 2008 @ 7:35 am
Jim Puckett’s long comment never addresses the point of my post:
BAN’s July 11, 2007 press release promotes an interpretation of two scientific papers that is neither supported by, or implied, by the data and conclusions in those papers. So, briefly, let me return to those papers.
On June 26, 2007, Jeffrey Weidenhamer and Michael Clement published a paper concerning the lead content in toy jewelery exported from China to the US. The authors, based upon their data, state: “The source materials for these jewelry items are unknown…”
On July 11, 2007, BAN issued a press release concerning that paper and another, entitled: “Research Identifies U.S. Electronic Waste as Likely Source of Toxic Jewelry Imports from China.”
Puckett makes no mention of those papers in his response to me. Instead, he spends most of his time attacking my professional integrity.
I have no intention of responding to any of that. I stand by my original statements and – in particular – the cited facts on the scale of the Chinese domestic scrap trade.
I should note that Puckett and BAN also attack ISRI. It is not my place to respond on ISRI’s behalf; after all, I am not an ISRI employee. However, I think it behooves Puckett to get his facts straight and know the name of the organization that he attacks. It is not, as he writes, the International Scrap Recyclers Institute. It is the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.
Facts matter, and that’s why I cite them when I have them, and pass over a subject when I don’t.
As I made clear in my post, I have the greatest respect for BAN and its work to halt the transboundary trade in e-waste. That has not changed. In fact, my sincere hope is that BAN could turn its attention to the greater and growing threat of China’s domestic supply of e-scrap.
And so, in that spirit, I sincerely hope that Puckett will make an effort to visit China, again – it’s been years – and re-adjust his understanding of the situation for the benefit of his donors, himself, and the media that relies upon him for accurate information.
Finally, visitors interested in a fact-based examination of the e-scrap import trade, make take an interest in my July 5 post, “Contaminated Exports … From Where?” The post was re-printed – in unedited form – in the November issue of Recycling International, a European trade journal devoted to the recycling trade. The original post may be found here: http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=117
Comment by Adam — January 15, 2008 @ 9:38 am
Let me get this straight. BAN relies on companies and people who DON’T send their e-waste to China to obtain statistics on the people who do.
As someone who has been in scrap for fifteen years I can tell you that anybody who doesn’t do it in China, doesn’t know it in China. Metech may be a fine company but the 500 containers in HK waiting for China is pure BS. Even the best connected guys at the HK port couldn’t make that kind of call. What a joke.
Comment by Singapore_Scrap — January 15, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Interesting that Dr. Weidenhamer hasn’t stopped by to defend himself. As much as he enjoys being quoted in the press at this late stage in his career, he doesn’t enjoy it enough to step out of the way when somebody representing a third tier green organization steps in front of him. Believe me when I tell you that the professional side of the US green advocacy movement has taken note of this little incident. Note to Puckett and BAN: Distorting and exaggerating scientific results is something that Bush and the Republicans do. Not us. Even when we’re hard up for funding. I’ll look forward to reading more from you, Adam.
Comment by Karen in D.C. — January 16, 2008 @ 9:50 am
Ok, I’m going to step in here and ask that commentators PLEASE maintain a civil tone. I’m not going to allow comments that contain obscenities, have a particularly personal edge, or don’t advance the discussion or information presented here. Criticism of me is fine and welcome (for example, see above), but keep it civil, folks.
Comment by Adam — January 16, 2008 @ 10:23 am
Dear Jim Plunkett –
I agree with Karen. You seem to be have a thing for distorting and exaggerating the statements and data of others. You write: “Finally and most disturbing, Adam fails to note that if it were in fact true that China was successful in cracking down on the illegal imports, the nature of the global market and North American waste trade uniquely being virtually unregulated, would simply mean that the waste would be redirected elsewhere to places such as Africa.”
Did you bother to read Shanghai Scrap’s original post? Because if you did, you would have read this:
“At the same time, there are other, less developed countries that have – over the last several years – become new, preferred destinations for imported e-scrap (in part because China has successfully barred large amounts of imported e-scrap that used to arrive in Taizhou and elsewhere). Shifting things around isn’t an improvement, in a global sense. But in a local sense, China should rightly take pride in the fact that it is rapidly losing its reputation as a global dumping ground (while, at the same time, becoming a dumping ground for its own waste).”
Mr. Plunkett, you really aren’t doing yourself or BAN any favors by making things up or taking things out of context. If you don’t have the data to make a truthful argument, then you shouldn’t be making an argument at all. I learned that in the second grade. The scientists in your study teach it to students I hope. Shame.
Sincerely,
A Little Beijing Angel
Comment by LtlBJAngel — January 16, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Adam -
It looks to me like Weidenhamer and Clement are hoping that this post just goes away and BAN is probably regretting that it responded. Do you have any idea if Weidenhamer and Clement have seen it? I don’t know if there’s much they can say at this point. The exaggerations are pretty much cut and dry so they probably just want to forget it.
Are you pushing this post to the environment or science press? Blogs like the ones at New Scientist would definitely be interested in this kind of story. What are your readership rates these days?
Comment by Dennis — January 17, 2008 @ 12:19 am
Shameless, aren’t they? BAN hasn’t pulled the press release from their site, yet! I guess if you aren’t with them, you’re against them even when they are full of it.
Comment by 123_UNME — January 17, 2008 @ 1:10 am
Dear Adam et al:
BAN’s integrity was surprisingly impugned by Adam’s article which he wrote without contacting me at all for clarification. It felt very much like a hatchet job from this quarter, so I felt obliged to respond with a truthful, vigorous defense. However as Adam noted, the tone here is getting even uglier and I am not sure why this disagreement can illicit such venom. For that reason though I think it wise to back off the strong rhetoric. If somebody has an axe to grind with our research I would be happy to discuss matters with anybody via email in a civil way. jpuckett@ban.org. In the meantime I just want to clarify some points before signing off:
1. It is clear from our press release that we only claimed that circumstantial evidence points to the fact that it is LIKELY that US e-waste is recycled into products that have found their way back to the US. We never said there was proof. I stand by this statement fully.
2. Actually it was the Wall Street Journal that made this assertion (of proof) most forcefully. Thus I don’t understand why Adam’s complaint does not mention the WSJ which made this assertion independent of BAN and our press release. Maybe its easier to pick on BAN than the Wall Street Journal — we don’t have a big legal staff. (see http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2007/070712_lead_toxins_round_trip.html)
3. I also stand by the statement that very significant quantities of e-waste continue to pour into China every day, particularly from North America. Of this fact I do have proof.
4. It was in fact BAN that provided the first information publicly available about e-waste trade in Africa and that did not occur until 2005.
5. Professor Weidenhamer is a busy man. His silence on this forum cannot be interpreted as meaning anything. I myself knew nothing of Adam’s diatribe against BAN until American Metals Market called me to tell me of it. If somebody wishes to communicate with Jeff his email is found on our press release on the front page of our website.
6. I was never good with acronyms…..
All the best, from the coordinator of a third-tier shameless environmental organization…..
Jim Puckett
Comment by Jim Puckett — January 17, 2008 @ 8:23 am
I’m late to this discussion, but I wanted to add my two cents. Its really clear Weidenhamer and Clement have been exaggerating their work to the press. Puckett can’t deny THAT. Neither can Weidenhamer and Clement who wisely have stayed out of this. Id be very surprised if either of those guys is ever again quoted saying what Weidenhamer tries to pass off as established fact in National Georgraphic. They got busted, pure and simple.
Its too bad that BAN became the central part of this discussion because the real problem is the willingness of the two scientists to allow their work to be misinterpreted and bastardized. Looks to me that they encourage it. But I don’t think Puckett can get off so easy. He says that BAN’s press release only claims “circumstantial evidence” for the connection between US e-scrap and the toxic toy imports. Nice try but I think the title of the press release suggests far more than “circumstatial evidence”:
“Research Identifies U.S. Electronic Waste as Likely Source of Toxic Jewelry Imports from China”
I don’t find that’s very circumstantial at all. That’s saying its all but certain. Blaming BAN is fair but the real blame belongs to the two scientists. They are talking way beyond their data and their knowledge or even the data published in other places. They are way beyond their capabilities and expertise when they start talking. Poor scientific practice. I don’t know if their peers pay attention to this stuff but I don’t think that the chemistry community is going to be overly impressed by this if they were to hear about it.
Comment by Scott — January 19, 2008 @ 11:02 am
Interesting article. I have a lot of issues on both sides BUT, regarding your ‘dissing’ of Mike Magliaro, you would have found that he is, in fact an “industry expert” and I personally collaborated with him on that estimate at the time. If you’d like to talk to us about it, we have an update for you, it’s well over 90%.
Cheers.
Comment by Lauren Roman — March 27, 2008 @ 4:24 am
Lauren -
Thanks much for stopping by, and the comment. I’ve sent an email to the address that you used with your comment, and I’m looking forward to hearing back from you in regard to that update. 90% is awfully high – higher than even the wildest estimates of five years ago when the trade was at its peak – but I have an open mind and interest in hearing what you have to say. Maser has a great reputation in the industry.
Comment by Adam — March 27, 2008 @ 11:50 pm
Dear Adam and all,
I’ve read all the posts here with great interest. I also know Adam Minter for a while now. Being in the e-scrap recycling business myself for more than 18 years, I have travelled several times to China in the past 5 years and visited numerous yards in the Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces. On several occassions, I have met Adam in China as well. As he knows, I don’t sell ( and never have ) any scrap to China or Africa, but I’m purchasing certain e-scrap qualities for recovery of metals and precious metals at our refinery in Europe all over the world – also in China. In the past, I did the same job, but for another european refinery.
The assumption, that a lot of the e-scrap one could see in the “streets of big cities” is from domestic use is plain wrong. Actually, the scrap yards foreigners have access to belong for 99% to importers, not local recyclers.
Recycling of domestic e-scrap takes place at some remote recycling areas inland – if at all ! No one likes to pay the cost for collection of domestic scrap. That’s one of the reasons, why a number of pilot projects for recycling of domestic e-scrap have no e-scrap to dismantle !
True, there’s PC and IT scrap collected in Cities like Bejing. Most of the time, it is disassembled right there and the parts are sold to Guangdong or Zhejing province. But according to local traders in Bejing and Chongquing i.e. is less than a few containers a month. These cities have both more than 10 million inhabitants. But old computers are rather reused then recycelt today. We were able to buy a 20″ container of boards ( 7 t ) in Bejing over the course of several weeks !
In the same time, I could have bought hundreds of tons in a single small import port at the coast. This shows the dimensions we’re talking here. Forget about large volumes of domestic scrap. If you see endo of live e-scrap in China, it’s for 99% from outside of China. For Production scrap, the number is certainly lower due to lot of production in china. Howver, this is totally different business at all, but mo less murky than the illegal import business.
Over the last 4 years , I have myself visited a great number of illegal smelting and pre-processing facilities for e-scrap in the mountain regions around Taizhou. I have seen the illegal leaching operations in the inner part of Guangdong province and the pre-treatment of complete scrap in many yards of Nanhai, Foshan, Taizhou , etc…
Actually, last week I just came back from trip to Guangdong and can say that not much has changed with regard to illegal treatment of e-scraps – same guys, same business.
I have visited Guiyu and negotiated even with the local government there. The major of the city showed me around to some shops who did dismantling of mobil phones – actually the work was done by young girls who should be in school at their age. I have visited good and not so good pre-processing sites for all kinds of e-scrap in the coastal regions of south china.
Most of all, I had many opportunities to talk to many chinese traders, importers and “E-scrap recyclers” over the last four years to learn what the e-scrap business in China is all about and how it works. I have talked to people who import e-scrap from central Asia, Japan, Korea and Russia into China. Most of this scrap finds its way into to Guangdong Province, because of the simple fact, that most of the “refining” capacities are located there.
Suffice to say, that this business is in total a kind of second economy in China – uncontrollable by neither environmental nor tax authorities.
Hundreds of thousands of people , also in central parts of China, live from this business. Even some chinese officials in Bejing acknowledged today , inofficially of course, that the sheer number of these small illegal operations makes it impossible to control this business.
But it is indeed a multi million ( by that I mean three figures ) USD business.
Of course, I can and will not tell any names and further details here, but rest assured, the size of illegal e-scrap business in China is by far larger than most people posting here can even imagine. For the most part , many officials are “inofficially” aware of that problem.
However – the question remains, what to do with the hundreds of thousand of workers and small farmers working with the illegally imported scrap once the imports could be stopped ?
How to replace the millions of “purchase power” in RMB generated by this business ?
Which jobs could these people do once the e-scrap business would be gone ?
I’m afraid, there will be no easy answer to these questions and no one responsible in China who would really like to touch these problems right now.
We asked for permits to export the environmentally problematic parts of e-scrap to process them in Europe ( where a lot of the e-scrap in China comes from anyway ). The answer was, that yes, indeed there is a lot of e-scrap, and also it was acknowldeged, that our process was environmetally sound – by far better than anything available in China today, but there will be no export permit because officially, this scrap doesn’t exist. So if it doesn’t exist, it cannot be exported officially either.
Also, no one could blame the authorities for not giving a permit on export for a material that doesn’t exist and hence no regulation does exist either.
After a lot of argueing, we finally got that permit, but we couldn’t buy any of the boards from scrap yards legally , because we didn’t have a “collection license”. No one informed us that we need such a licence until we tried to export the first container back to Europe. We asked, how we could possibly apply for a collection license of material which doesn’t exist ? Indeed, the answer was, “that’s true” – “and that’s the reason why we can’t grant you that permit even if you would apply” – But there would be a company in the province who has such a collection license , but only for domestic scrap – we could try to work with them together” – so much for the support of the authorities in China.
According to a number of operators of illegal smelting or processing facilities, government measures against the illegal processing last anything from a couple days to a couple weeks at most.
The so called “cleanup” in Taizhou , mentioned in one of the posts above, lasted less then a month. During this time, the E-scrap was simply shipped to Guiyu,Sanshui,Quingyuan, Huizhou, Pearl River Delta or even Vietnam. Also, large volumes were simply not shipped to Taizhou in the firsdt place but hold back for a while before shipment resumed from other regions of China, Taiwan, and Korea.
From our frequent visits and the offers we get, we know quite good, how much e-scrap is i.e. imported into a certain port as part of regular scrap imports .
We are also informed on a regular basis about scrap avialability in certain regions of China. Based on these figures, we can make our own estimate about how much material is still entering the country. And we can say so much : it’s not less than in the past.
Comment by Stefan Fuchs — April 1, 2008 @ 8:23 pm
Stefan -
Thanks for stopping by. I just happened to be logged in as you posted your comment. I intend to respond in more detail, later, but I’m on deadline right now (for something else), so a brief response will have to do.
I don’t disagree with you about the extent of the illegal (quasi-legal, or however you want to characterize them) operations in Guangdong. They are there; no question. The question: where does it come from? And I don’t disagree that there is still e-scrap moving into the Taizhou region – mountains, etc. The workshop industry that started there, persists. But I’ve been all over those mountains during the last few years, and I must respectfully disagree – the e-scrap situation has improved there, and dramatically.
Likewise, I disagree with your characterization of the domestic e-scrap situation. In May, I will be publishing a lengthy piece on how, where, and how much domestic e-scrap is – and will be – processed in China. This is a Beijing initiative, and out of respect for my publisher’s right to have an exclusive on the material (they paid for it!), I won’t go into the details now. But, suffice it to say, there’s a significant amount of e-scrap being generated in Chinese cities that is NOT being re-used. And, at the same time, that material is beginning to flow into gov’t-established recycling programs that – with subsidies – are able to compete with the street trade. Again, I won’t go into this now, but will after my story is published.
Stefan has very good sources, no doubt. But as I’ve learned the hard way during my five years as a journalist on the ground in China, there are always other sources, other sides to the story. I may not have been to the places that Stefan has been; but Stefan hasn’t been to the places that I’ve been. And contrary to what Stefan says: there are significant domestic e-scrap operations occurring in cities with populations that exceed 10 million; I’ve been to them; I have photos; and I will publish them next month. These operations are not perfect; but they’re a step forward.
Finally, there seems to be an assumption among some of the people leaving comments on this thread that I am somehow supportive of the illegal e-scrap trade because I continue to claim that Chinese domestic sources are overtaking imported ones. This is not only silly and illogical – it couldn’t be further from the truth, especially if you look at some of my more critical writings on this blog and elsewhere (for example – “Contaminated Exports from Where?” – also published in Recycling Int’l). For those who care to look a little deeper, I have been openly critical of the industry, going so far as to give a speech at the 2004 ISRI Commodity Roundtables where my powerpoint presentation consisted of a slide with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “Smuggler.” There were well over 500 scrap industry participants in the room when I did that, and it was not received well.
I care, as much as anyone, what happens to this material. As a five-year resident of Shanghai, I’m quite keenly aware of the impact of this material on the health of the average Chinese – and, frankly, on me. That I may disagree with people in the environmental community who overstate their cases doesn’t mean that I disagree with their intentions (most of the time). It just means that I hold them to a higher standard of proof.
Anyway, I’ll be getting back to this in a few days. But right now, I have to take care of my day job!
Comment by Adam — April 1, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
Just for those questioning the estimated numbers :
According to ICA studies done by all China Market research, Bejing, on official import statistics, about 5 Mio t of copperscrap entered China in 2006. 85% of that in form of cable scrap.
The unaccounted amount of copperscrap, imported illegally by using false declaration or mix of scrap types for tax avoidance, has been calculated with about 2,5 Mio t for the same year based official estimates. Most of this unaccounted copper scrap is E-scrap.
In the same study, data says that 4 Mio t of domestic E-Waste were recycled in China, including sales into second hand market, in 2006.
From that about 370.000 t of Cu bearing scraps were generated. That is less than what China imports on copperscrap alone in one month.
In the same study, there’s official data about the import of 1.7 Mio t of electric machines scrap, 1.15 Mio t of Waste IT Hardware, 110 K t of Transformer scrap and 1.2 Mio t of cable scrap – all for 2006 and only for the Bohai sea region, Yangtse Delta, Pearlriver delta.
The data was collected from close to 100 of the largest importers ! Now these were only the figures they wanted to tell.
Also, there are no figures yet available about scrap imports via inland borders in the north of china ( Russia, Central Asia ) but it is known, that scraps from these regions are bought in large quantities for further recycling in China.
Also not included are the volumes imported via HK / Mainland, and of course not such “imported” volumes being converted into domestic volumes in the Dalian bay, Pearl River delta or in the little ports not far from Shantou.
This business is nothing new and still going on strong.
A remark on some “calculations” made in the initial post regarding needed amounts of containers and shipping volumes :
The AQSIQ reported during a meeting with the EU statistics for the first 9 Months of 2007 – showing that more than 360.000 containers with scrap / Waste were controlled during this period ( leading to unbelievable logistical problems in some ports, of course )
The number of controlled containers was far less then those uncontrolled. So even if one would need 200.000 containers for all the e-scrap to import into China, there would be sufficient opportunities to do so…. In Particular, if e-scrap is mixed with pre cutted / shredded Iron / Al scrap – of which literally Mio. of tons are imported into China´each year.
One e-scrap burning facility I visited in the Taizhou region mentioned, they treat about 20 t of printed circuit boards a day ( 2 – 3 containerloads ) and there are about 30 other, similar operations in the wider region , doing approx. the same amount.
I found out about similar figures in certain regions of Guangdong. That scrap comes all from the importers.
I also visited a number of , better equipped, treatment plants for domestic board scrap ( production ) only one such sites did about 11.000 t a year and claimed, the competition of five other, similar and larger sized plants in the region makes it impossible to grow much beyond this volume – this was only for the region of Shenzhen !
So in a nutshell – I don’t know whether the majority of illegal e-scrap imports are originating from the US. But that is not the point for me. The point is, that still huge amounts of e-scrap materials from all over the world enter China, despite the fact, that law and regulation in China forbids the import of these scraps.
Comment by Stefan Fuchs — April 1, 2008 @ 9:55 pm
e-scrap sent to china is definately coming from the U.S. and Batteries are also sent to China from U.S. scrap companies. I know this because I work at the very company shipping the material.
Comment by withheld — May 13, 2009 @ 11:44 pm
ERAI , ERAIESCROW can have their offices here in Guiyu. May be then sales of counterfeits from these towns can be regulated and improved. Right now ERAI is only helping Gungzhou and Shenzhen traders to export goods from China to USA and rest of world.
Obsolete parts from China ( removed from trash) are in big demand for US military, pentagon and NASA. Without which billions of dollars worth Aircraft, equipments would be required to be scrapped. 75 % of substandard produce pass through American independent brokers for America and further selling.
More Chinese suppliers from here require help of Kristal and Mark Snider in selling their products to America efficiently with the help of their platform like erai, eraiescrow, parthunter, IAED etc.
Comment by Broker — September 11, 2009 @ 5:40 am
Many American agencies like ERAI.com and their networked brokers who buy cheap parts for fat profit, are responsible for developing and pushing counterfeit industry to its peak.
Most counterfeits of obsolete parts are traded by American brokers produced in China.
visit another video with evidences:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O4jslHi4pE
Many companies like USBID, GLOBAL SOLUTIONS ELECTRONIC, V& C TECHNOLOGIES, IDENTEK, VISIONTECH ARE TRADING MILITARY COUNTERFEITS.
Comment by component broker — November 27, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
My name is Nazir Khan from Pakistan. I need scrap. Tell me how can i buy scrap from ur company. Thanks
Comment by nazir khan — February 8, 2010 @ 6:04 pm