Recently, a photojournalist from Reuters went to Guiyu Town, Guangdong Province, which is the world’s largest dumping ground for electronic waste.
During the peak period, there are 5,000 recycling workshops operating at the same time, handling 15,000 tons of garbage every day. These wastes include hard disks, mobile phones, computers and other electronic wastes from all over the world.
China has consumed a lot of electronic products and brought a lot of electronic waste at the same time, and has become the second largest producer of electronic waste after the United States.
A worker is recycling CD players.
Most workers working in recycling workshops work in poorly ventilated workshops. Because there are no protective tools for them to use, they usually disassemble waste electronic products by their own hands.
Recycling old mobile phone accessories in the workshop.
Metal shells of electronic products piled up in the suburbs of Guiyu.
Three-wheeled motorcycles dragged electronic waste to a small local workshop.
Tricycles for transporting electronic waste can be seen everywhere on the road.
Plastic parts of e-waste are crowded with roadside.
A children’s car on an abandoned circuit board.
According to the research of Shantou University, the air and water in Guiyu Town are seriously polluted by toxic metal particles, and the blood of children living there usually contains abnormally high concentrations of lead.
Several buffaloes are grazing outside the recycling factory.
A polluted river flows through the garbage recycling workshop.
In the process of recycling garbage, circuit boards and other accessories will be melted to recycle valuable metals, such as gold, copper, aluminum and so on. However, a large number of pollutants, heavy metals and chemicals are released into the river, which seriously pollutes the local water source. The color of the river is also black due to the influx of a large number of industrial wastewater, and the whole town of Guiyu is shrouded in the stench of burnt plastic.
A man is riding a motorcycle in Guiyu where night falls.
In Guiyu, another new recycling factory has started construction.
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