Guiyu

Following up news articles and e-mails from mainland China, BAN was directed to an e-waste processing area known as Guiyu on the Longdong River near the city of Shantou in the northeast [of] Guangdong Province, four hours by car from Hong Kong. In the course of three intensive days in and around Guiyu's four villages, the small investigative team witnessed firsthand what passes for recycling of e-waste in Asia.

2002, Jim Puckett, 5:35 from the start, in Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, spoken by Mary Ryan, Basel Action Network, →OCLC

On a recent morning in Guiyu, in Guangdong province, hundreds of men squatted in concrete-block sheds, sifting through computers and printers and breaking them into scrap with their bare hands.

2003 February 24, Peter S. Goodman, “China Serves As Dump Site For Computers”, in The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 01 Oct 2023

The residents of Guiyu, including children, make their living sorting, dismantling and burning computer parts or bathing them in nitric and hydrochloric acids to recover precious metals.

2008 January 12, Jon Mooallem, “The risk-filled afterlife”, in The New York Times (International Business section), New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 14 Mar 2023

On seemingly every street, laborers sit on the pavement outside workshops ripping out the guts of household appliances with hammers and drills. The roads in Guiyu are lined with bundles of plastic, wires, cables and other garbage.

2013 May 30, Ivan Watson, “China: The electronic wastebasket of the world”, in CNN, archived from the original on 31 May 2013

GUIYU, China (Reuters) - The dizzying stench of burning plastic still drifts through the alleys, workshops and warehouses of Guiyu, the southern Chinese town that has long symbolized China’s role as the main recycler of the world’s waste.[...]In the 2000s, Guiyu became a symbol of the environmental devastation caused by recycling hazardous waste with little regulation after being singled out by groups like Greenpeace and featuring in a string of international media reports. Trash is still the mainstay of Guiyu’s economy, but hundreds of recycling businesses have been consolidated or shut completely in recent years and authorities are now cracking down on smuggled waste, further starving small and polluting businesses of supplies. “Although the dismantling of old electronics is the leading industry in Guiyu, we should say it was more a profession than an industry,” said Zheng Jinxiong, vice chairman of a government commission tasked with running the recycling industry park, set up on the edge of town.

2018 January 23, David Stanway, “China trash town's cleanup bolstered by import ban”, in Reuters, archived from the original on 24 Dec 2019