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Wong says current recycling methods include “burning wire piles to recover metals, melting circuit boards over coal grills and extracting metals in acid baths.” Most workers also lack any kind of safety equipment, such as respirators, to protect them from the fumes.

Record levels

Burning wires and other material releases dioxins and furans, which, according to the World Health Organization, can cause cancer and disrupt endocrine and reproductive systems. However, so far there have been few studies of the health of people living near e-waste recycling sites.

Wong and colleague studied 20 women in their mid-20s at two different sites&colon; a major e-waste recycling site in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, and Hangzhou – a city in the same province that does not carry out such recycling.

Residents of the control town had levels of dioxins that similar to those of people in Ireland and Sweden. At the e-waste site, however, dioxin levels were among the highest recorded anywhere in the world – women’s breast milk had more than twice the concentration of dioxins found in the control site and their placentas had nearly three times the concentration of the chemical.

The study also found that women who had lived near the e-waste site for longer periods had relatively higher dioxin levels, as well as a higher chance of suffering a spontaneous abortion. Wong says, though, that more research is needed to tell whether the elevated levels of dioxins are related to health problems.

“It’s a bit circumstantial because there’s no proof that the recycling causes the high levels of dioxins, but it’s likely,” says environmental chemist Gareth Thomas of Lancaster University, UK.

Illegal disposal?

Thomas argues that countries have a responsibility to make sure their electronic waste is disposed of properly. “We should only export [e-wastes] if they’re going to be treated with the same standards that we would expect them to be treated here,” he says.

“The results indicate that there’s a real problem,” adds Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network (BAN), a Seattle-based watchdog group. Richer countries that have ratified the Basel Convention – an international agreement concerning import and export of hazardous materials – are not supposed to export these materials to developing countries, including China, Westervelt points out.

The United States is the only developed country not to have ratified the convention. Even so, while all European Union members are bound by it, “we found plenty of [e-waste] from the UK both in Nigeria and China,” Westervelt says.

Meanwhile, Wong worries that the problem of electronic waste may simply be shifted from China to other developing countries. “The Chinese government has imposed tighter control, so the amount of electronic waste entering into mainland China has been decreased,” he says. “However, the wastes are finding their way to other developing countries and we worry that the same mistake may be repeated.”