Two villages, seen in the mid-2000s

Nanhai, in this telling, could pass at first for an ordinary Chinese farming village, except for the heaps of discarded electronics. Computer monitors were stacked in shops. Women melted solder in a corner. Among the products, brands from Apple, Sony, Samsung, and Hyundai were said to be common, and children running with wires and cases were a familiar sight. After tighter government checks, the work was no longer done openly outdoors. It had moved into houses, unofficially. Locals said that people there feared the press so much that if word spread of an outsider in the village, workshops across the place might simply close.

Guiyu is described as more severe, and as China's largest e-waste village. From Guangzhou it was a five-hour bus ride to the coastal city of Shantou, then about an hour and a half onward. The population was given as 120,000, of whom about 100,000 were in e-waste work, and the place was called the world's largest such processing area. Unlike Nanhai, people were often seen pulling chips from circuit boards taken out of computers and appliances. Many of those workers, the account says, were teenage girls, with no gloves or masks, working almost around the clock inside houses that looked quiet from the alley. Vents in the walls sent out black smoke and the smell of burning wire. Young women baked boards in charcoal furnaces to recover valuable metal. The river was lined with dumped waste, and the writer warns that anyone washing or bathing there would be at serious risk.

A 2006 lead study, and the substances the work releases

Residents were described as having done this work for some ten years. A decade earlier they had farmed at a more leisurely pace; once the income from e-waste overtook farming, the area grew into a processing center on a very large scale. In 2006 — 'last year' in the wording of the account — a study supported by Greenpeace measured lead levels in children's bodies and found lead poisoning in more than 80 percent of those tested. The writer added that no special government measure had followed, and that children there were still in distress. Those figures, and that aftermath, are left in 2006. They are not treated as a picture of the same places today.

E-waste, as defined here, is electrical and electronic equipment that the original owner has sold, given away, or thrown out, no longer of value. A European Union list is cited, from large and small appliances to IT and consumer electronics, lighting, tools, toys, medical equipment, monitors, and dispensers. Washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, and computers are named as a large share of the flow. The amount of discarded electronics had been rising, the writer says, as incomes rose, prices fell, product types multiplied, and average lifespans shortened. Industrialized countries produced the most, but rapidly growing economies such as China and India were also seeing increases, even if per-person amounts were still lower. Improper treatment can release PCBs, PBBs, and PBDEs, especially in low-temperature open burning. These persistent organic pollutants accumulate in fatty tissue and are linked here to disorders of the liver, the thyroid, and the nervous system. Lead in solder, hexavalent chromium in plating, cadmium compounds, mercury from broken parts, and hydrogen chloride from burning PVC — which can become hydrochloric acid in air — are also named. In this account, the smartphone is called a particular headache, and the movement of e-waste between countries is mentioned as a diplomatic problem. Later official policies are not filled in, and are not taken up further here.

Sources

1. a mid-2000s account of informal e-waste processing in Nanhai and Guiyu, including population and workforce figures for Guiyu left in that period, a 2006 Greenpeace-supported study that found lead poisoning in more than 80 percent of the children tested, and a list of toxic substances released by improper recycling.

Last updated: 14 November 2026