Data Show Electronic Waste Piling Up In China Under Weak Regulatory Controls

摘要

China is treating little of the electronic waste that it produces, with much of it going into secondary markets for reuse or broken down in unlicensed workshops, according to the latest data gathered by the Basel Convention Regional Center for the Asia and Pacific Region at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Only about 24 percent of the electronic waste in China ends up being processed by licensed recyclers, the data showed. And the figures do not account for what could "be hundreds of thousands of tons" of electronic waste illegally imported into China each year, said Yang Jie, a technical assistant at the Basel Convention Regional Center (BCRC), speaking at the Green Standards Week conference in Beijing Sept. 23. The imported waste primarily goes to unlicensed workshops to be broken down by hand by migrant workers in places such as Guiyu in southern China's Guangdong province, dubbed the "e-waste capital of the world."