UP to 100,000 tons of discarded electronic goods ranging from computers to refrigerators are piling up in Shanghai and the city has no means of disposing of the environment-threatening junk.

A treatment plant, specially designed to handle electronic trash, is under construction in Wuxi in neighbouring Jiangsu Province and it is expected to be operational in March next year. However, its capacity is limited to treating only 30,000 tons annually and that won’t improve until the second phase of the project is completed sometime in the future. Even when the plant is operating at full capacity, it will only be able to treat 60,000 tons annually.

Household electronic appliances that were bought in the mid or late-1980s are at the end of their lifespan of 10 to 15 years and next year the amount of electronic trash being dumped in the city will peak.

Experts have estimated that annually Shanghai residents will be getting rid of some 250,000 television sets, 200,000 refrigerators and 200,000 washing machines.

The Shanghai Morning Post has reported that most of these unwanted or useless appliances will be transported to the Wuxi plant for final disposal. Meanwhile, the city is planning to build its own treatment facility so that 500,000 items of electronic junk can be handled annually.

Illegal recycling

However, not having enough treatment plants to handle dumped electronic goods is only one of the problems facing the city and the country. The biggest difficulties are the absence of laws covering the situation and its threat to the environment and resistance on the part of the manufacturers of electronic appliances to share the responsibility for solving the whole disposal problem.

The State Development Planning Commission and the Ministry of Information three years ago began drafting an administrative regulation covering the recycling of household electronic appliances. According to the 21st Century Business Herald, this legislative approach is now at a standstill.

East China’s Zhejiang Province and Qingdao in Shandong Province have been selected as two trial locations in which to set up recycling and treatment plants.

Zhejiang Province has a large number of electronic appliances and computers awaiting final disposal and Qingdao is home to several of the country’s biggest manufacturers of the goods, including Haier and Hisense.

Zhejiang is to build the most up-to-date treatment plants and Qingdao is to try to find ways to get the manufacturers to take some responsibility for treating the trash.

The first obstacle to be overcome was the difficulty in collecting unwanted electronic junk. Many vendors were travelling around neighbourhoods on bikes collecting unwanted appliances and re-selling them to less developed areas in inland China after changing some of the parts.

Even in the local flea markets, shopowners were stripping the appliances, picking out some of the still useful parts and throwing the rest away.

In the market on Qiujiang Lu in Shanghai, some shop owners said they only kept the picture tubes from TV sets and the mainboards of computers and all other parts were discarded.

However, the heavy metals in the materials within electronic appliances pose a threat to the environment. A study has shown that of the 700 chemical elements contained in a computer, half are harmful to people’s health.

Some of the unwanted parts are bought by illegal workshops, which process them to extract valuable metals by burning and other unsupervised methods which lead to serious pollution of underground water, soil and air.

Sharing the cost

The fact that the amount of electronic junk being collected for the first stage of the recycling process was below expectations led investors to doubt that their treatment plants could make a profit.

Zhejiang Province has picked 11 cities to form a collection network that would provide sufficient material for a plant designed to treat 800,000 discarded electronic appliances every year.

The provincial authorities have encouraged retailers to carry out a policy of “Old exchanged for new??and give consumers a discount when they buy new appliances if they hand in the old ones.

The authorities have also taken measures to deal with individual vendors.

After a seven-month trial, Hong Liang, the man in charge of the project, said more detailed plans still remained to be worked out.

An important principle in the administrative regulation was that the appliance producers should make some financial contribution to solving the problem because of the potential pollution hazard they had brought about.

A staff member at a domestic PC manufacturer said the producers, some of whom made only small profits, might not be able to share the cost of electronic waste treatment and they would have to transfer this burden to consumers by raising prices.

“We have taken a lot of surveys from the State departments about the future treatment policy,?said Tao Jun of the Shanghai-based electronic appliance enterprise SVA Group. “Though the final result has not come out, I believe that the government will consider the situation of producers and it will not make us pay all the bill.? Where the funds to pay for treatment work will come from and the sum that each party should pay have not yet been decided, according to Zhang Youliang of China’s Household Electronic Appliance Research Institution.

EU restriction

The pressure to move quickly in finalizing a policy has become more urgent now that some foreign countries have announced their own compulsory schemes to cover disposal of electronic junk.

On February 13, 2003, the European Union released its directive on Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and a further directive on the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electric and Electronic Equipment (ROHS).

Under WEEE, producers must provide a deposit for the future expense of collection, treatment, recycling and environment-friendly disposal of waste electric and electronic products, as of August 13 next year.

The ROHS directive provides that member states ensure restrictions in the use of lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium VI in electric and electronic products that enter the market from July 1, 2006.

China is concerned about the effect the two directives will have on bilateral trade in electric and electronic products.

The EU restrictions also apply to all imported products and this has pushed China into speeding up its efforts to draft its own policies covering the manufacture of electronic products.