Worldwide, we generate around 20 – 30 million tons of e-waste every year. It’s a whole lot of cell phones/smart-phones, TV sets, and computers—and iPads and e-readers and all of the many, many, many things the industry is concocting to sell you in the future—being sent off, largely to overseas recycling centers often of poor repute. (Please read Motherboard’s piece from earlier this year about the messy and ugly e-waste recycling market.) And no one should be surprised that the massive concentrations of heavy metals disturbed, via unsafe/crude disposal practices, in these overseas “recycling” centers have the capability of causing disease in their neighboring/host communities. A team of researchers have just published a study examining air conditions in Taizhou in Zhejiang province, China — an area that handles about 2-million tons of e-waste a year with the help of about 60,000 employees. Indeed, the study found that, yep, the air in Taizhou has the capability of causing cancers and other problems. Basically, they took air samples from two locations around the city and exposed it to lung tissue. They looked at levels of Interleukin-8, a chemical marker of inflammation, damaging Reactive Oxygen Species, and expressions of the p53 gene, a marker that cells are being damaged. All three were significantly high.
