Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap wrote about e-waste in China, an urgent problem that is about the get worse with the introduction of the iPhone, he argues:
Before year’s end, Apple and China Unicom will finally launch the iPhone in China, leaving hundreds of thousands of affluent Chinese cell-phone users with an increasingly pressing question: What should they do with their old handsets? Sure, some will pass them on to friends and relatives, and others will stash them in drawers. But for those precious few who decide that they’d like to recycle their old cell phones in an environmentally sound manner, they’ll be mostly out of luck. Unlike in the United States, Apple doesn’t offer to collect and recycle old cell phones for its customers in China. And the Chinese government, which has long decried the developed world’s exports of e-waste to its shores, has done almost nothing to handle the growing tide of its own, homegrown e-waste, generated by its expanding middle class. In short, as China grows, consumes, and gets hooked on the iPhone, the environmental disaster that is South China’s e-waste processing industry is about to become much worse.
Read more about toxic e-waste in China via CDT.
