Guiyu () is a

town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an ori ...

created from an agglomerate of four adjoined villages totalling 150,000 people in the Chaoyang district of

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

province in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. Situated on the

South China Sea The South China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean. It is bounded in the north by the shores of South China (hence the name), in the west by the Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by the islands of Taiwan and northwestern Phil ...

coast, Guiyu is perhaps best known in the global

environmentalist An environmentalist is a person who is concerned with and/or advocates for the protection of the environment. An environmentalist can be considered a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that se ...

community for its reception of e-waste. In fact, the town also holds the record for being the largest e-waste site of the world, as of 2013.

Electronic waste

Guiyu was once the largest e-waste site on earth, Regions like Guiyu rely on primitive electronics recycling as an economic staple despite the adverse effects electronic waste has on health and the environment. The burning off of plastics in the town has resulted in 80% of its children having dangerous levels of lead in their blood. A recent study of the area evaluated the extent of heavy metal contamination from the site. Using dust samples, scientists analysed mean heavy metal concentrations in a Guiyu workshop and found that lead and copper were 371 and 115 times higher, respectively, compared to areas located 30 kilometres away. The same study revealed that sediment from the nearby Lianjiang River was found to be contaminated by

polychlorinated biphenyl Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are highly carcinogenic chemical compounds, formerly used in industrial and consumer products, whose production was banned in the United States by the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1979 and internationally by t ...

s at a level three times greater than the guideline amount. Since 2013, local authorities moved most e-waste workshops into an experimental

industrial ecology Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The global industrial economy can be modelled as a network of industrial processes that extract resources from the Earth and transform those resource ...

park called the National Circular Economy Pilot Industry Park. There, toxic waste by products can be better treated and recycled. Air and water quality subsequently improved in the town, though many were still left contaminated from the remnants of e-waste processing and have not been cleaned up. In 2005 the Italian band

Planet Funk Planet Funk is an Italian electronic band. The group is composed of Marco Baroni, Domenico "GG" Calipari, Alex Neri, Dan Black and formerly Sergio Della Monica who died in February 2018. In addition a number of guest vocalists joined the group, i ...

shot and published the music video for their song "Stop Me" in which Guiyu and its e-waste environment are portrayed.

References

{{Reflist, 2

External links

Images of e-waste
Shantou

Electronic waste

See also

References

External links