www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/7584728.htm

Can you imagine how much it would cost to recycle this crap in the USA, what with the EPA, minimum wage laws and OSHA....



NEW DELHI, India - Atul Maheshwari has something to hide. He will not permit photographs inside the high-walled courtyard of his mud-brick factory, where a half-dozen workers scurry about dipping circuit boards in and out of blue plastic drums filled with acid, stripping the boards of their last remnants of copper and traces of silver.

None of the workers wears a mask to ward off noxious fumes, and only one has thin yellow gloves to protect his skin from the toxic brew. When the acid is depleted, the men dump it into the open sewer lining a rutted dirt side-road in the Mandoli industrial area, a collection of small, decaying factories in the northeastern corner of India's capital.

Maheshwari says he ignores city regulations and burns the bare plastic boards in the open air, just like the 10 rival scrap yards doing the same work in the area. He boasts of procuring his scrap from North America, South Africa and Hong Kong, which he processes along with computer waste generated throughout India.

``If your country keeps sending us the material, our business will be good,'' he said, speaking through an interpreter.

As India emerges as a technology powerhouse, poverty, cheap labor and rampant corruption make it a prime market for the dumping and burning of unregulated electronic waste, environmental activists say. And Maheshwari's business is a stark example of this growing global industry that begins as trash in Silicon Valley and throughout the developed world and ends in India, China, the Philippines and other developing countries.

Fed largely by the discards of U.S. consumers and businesses, this burgeoning traffic in hazardous electronic waste is attracting growing scrutiny because of the pollution it causes and the danger it poses to unskilled workers overseas.

Yeah?  And you'll be wondering why your kids have 2 heads, 3 eyes and 7 toes if you keep processing and dumping that shit into your environment like that.

Oh, sorry.  Your government will just blame the US for sending the stuff to you in the first place. [banghead]

It is a fact that thirld world countries create far more pollution than the United States, but when we go to one of those "Environmental Conferences", they always blame us for the world's pollution and they always tell us to regulate this and that.  Their goal is to cripple the US economy, so we won't be such a huge powerhouse anymore (envious miscreants).  What they don't realize is that if we (USA) go down, the whole world will go down with us!

Since the whole world hates us, why don't we just screw them all and enslave the whole planet!  I am sick and tired of these third world dufuses and their pretentious, imbeciles-with superiority complex European "allies / benefactors".

In fairness to India, they do have laws against this sort of behavior (open air burning and toxic dumping), in fact they probably have bigger penalties for doing it than we do.  The problem is enforcement which is hampered by bribery, lack of funds, local politics, and lack of enformcement skills.

There have been some big cases against dumpers and polluters there, often times cases filed by local environmentalist lawyers, and I have noticed the air is quite a bit cleaner in some cities in India than it used to be.

GunLvr

Oh hell, screw Third World countries - if the air doesn't get you, the water will!