Lecture 2

Guiyu

1. A worker piles discarded aluminum computer casings on the back of a motorized transport at the town of Guiyu in southern China.
2. Workers extract plastics from discarded electronics in Guiyu, a few hours' drive northeast of Hong Kong. The city has 5,500 family workshops handling e-waste.
3. Child amongst the rubble.

E-waste dump of the world, By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

GUIYU, China — When discarded computers vanish from desktops around the world, they often end up in Guiyu, which may be the electronic-waste capital of the globe.

The city is a sprawling computer slaughterhouse. Some 60,000 laborers toil here at primitive e-waste recycling — if it can be called that — even as the work imperils their health amid a runoff of toxic metals and acids.

Sourced - New York Times online.

I put this in because its not something we tend to think about when we look at technology - were is all this waste actually going when we throw away a 3 year old computer.