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.
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The environmental costs of China's e-waste processing industry were first documented by activists and journalists in the early part of this decade. Then, as now, coverage generally focused on the e-waste "dumped" by the developed world. Those countries often prefer not to take the trouble and expense of processing their high-tech throwaways in an environmentally sound manner, so for decades they have simply shipped the stuff overseas. In documentaries and news stories, South China has been dubbed the West's "digital dump," where toxic chemicals are used to extract metals from old circuit boards with the leftovers tossed into streams.
Yet even as those first stories ran, the business of processing e-waste in South China was changing from one focused on imported waste to one attuned to the burgeoning Chinese middle class and its throwaways. Televisions, refrigerators, and other appliances purchased in the mid-1980s were reaching the end of their life cycles, and China -- which still lacks any environmentally sound e-waste recycling -- allowed them to flow southward into the now largely domestic digital dump.
Nobody really knows just how many computers, cell phones, and monitors the Chinese throw away every year, though estimates abound. Analysts can safely claim that China is second only to the United States in PC units sold (40 million in 2008). As for cell phones, estimates are a bit easier due to the need to purchase actual airtime: This year, China is expected to have more than 650 million cell-phone users, who will purchase in excess of 190 million handsets. China's highly fragmented retail sector, dominated by small vendors with gray-market relationships, also makes it impossible to know how many appliances are in use. In a 2007 speech, Liu Fuzhong, an official with the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, noted that Chinese consumers own 1.5 billion televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and air-conditioning units (all of which are hazardous, to some degree, to recycle), with 120 million such appliances entering the waste stream each year. I saw what the result looks like in December during my last visit to Guiyu, the most notorious of South China's e-waste villages. Giant piles of cell phones were strewn across the yards of home-based dismantling workshops, from which the smell of acid, used to extract gold, wafted.
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