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To: Snowshoe who wrote (61139)	3/17/2005 7:05:24 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Yes, on paper, China has banned the imports of those junks from 2000. But they are now coming in by smuggling, a lot of them. (in some workshop, 40 tons in 3 days), and under the name of regular "imports". And in XiaMen, FuJian province, in August only of 2002, the imports of copy machines increased by 130%. After the inspectation, the custom found out most of them were e-junks. There are still plenty of small towns/villages in Guangdong and Fujian make a living by scrapping e-junks. One ton of circuit board can separate out one lb of gold, 286 lbs of copper, 44 lbs of tin...Just that 1 lb of gold will worth $6000. And the poor people who scrap those metals often times do not even have any most basic protection, like gloves or a mouthpiece. and they are being paid pennies but the people who smuggled them in would make thousands. And the residents in these villages usually have to buy water from outside because the well is already polluted. Some international research shows that 80% of all the US e-Junk have been put into containers and sent back to China, India, and Pakistan. And China, no surprise, receives 90% of them (I guess that is because where most containers destined to? who knows?). And China has no any formal facility to deal with these junks, so they just went to the small workshops. What a trade for the US. They get brand new cheap product, and then send back all those unwanted, highly-cost-to-destroy junks back to China! Personally, I think this is a worse deal comparing to Opium trade with the British in 19th century. At least, opium only hurt the people who smoke it, not the environment, not the water resource...., not the following generations! And what is the source of this problem? Yes, once again, big multinational companies! They should fully aware of where exactly these harmful junks will end up with before they whole sell them to some brokers. Yet, they still sell it. But the nature works in a magistical way. Because those big companies wrongful doing would eventually come back to hunt themselves in the form of polluted atmosphere. After all, we are living on the same planet. Who suffered the most? yes, Chinese themselves, but Koreans and Japanese are not too far either. Yes, I agree that it is the Chinese gov. responsibility to prevent this sort of things from happening. But with the corrupted, short-sighted local officials, and the will of making profit of those unethical small workshop owners, the central gov. can hardly do much. Where there is a profit, there is a way.