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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long and today I'm looking at the problem of electrical and electronic waste. We all produce it, old mobile phones, computers, fridges and the like. Tons of it gets exported each year, mostly from wealthier to poorer nations, where recycling is cheaper and waste can be dumped more easily.
One such country is Thailand, which has seen a big influx of e-waste. Businesses have expanded to what becomes a sort of a garbage site, an international garbage processing facility in Thailand, which is not what we want at all.
It's an environmental hazard in a country famous for its beautiful beaches and its tourist industry. Thailand has really borne the brunt of so much of what's gone on. This is a net negative if you import this dirty material for recycling. You are going to contaminate your soil, your people. And although imports of e-waste are clearly part of the problem, Thais are compounding things too by often failing to recycle their own old electronic gadgets. I used to sell it.
But for the past couple of devices, I just live it at home. So today on Business Daily, I'm in Thailand looking at what the country's doing to stem its growing tide of electronic waste.
I'm in the province of Chonburi in the east of Thailand. It's about a 90-minute drive from Bangkok, and I'm here with officials from Thailand's Ministry of Industry. They're planning to visit an industrial plant, a factory here which they suspect is illegally processing electronic waste, and they've agreed to take me along with them. It's a surprise visit. The Chinese owners of the plant don't know we're coming,
And I'll be honest, I don't quite know what we're going to find when we get there. We get to the site and we find that we can drive right inside. There are no locked gates, no security. We park up on a bit of waste ground and I start looking round. There's a big warehouse full of piles of scrap metal and other junk.
I'm just sifting through some of this waste now and some of it looks like it's car parts, bits of car engines, maybe even bits of aeroplanes or something that looks like a plane propeller. There are also smaller items, some keyboards, some circuit boards and lots of metal cables as well. Suddenly a man appears and the government officials start questioning him.
Is this man the owner? He's one of the managers of the factory. The man says he's just looking after the site for its Chinese owners. He says the scrap all came into Thailand from abroad. But he says he doesn't know much more than that. In a second warehouse, we find a big crushing machine which is used to grind the waste into a kind of gravel. And everywhere you look, there are huge sacks of this stuff.
I ask my translator Mao what's being said. This obviously is e-waste that's already smashed and put in the big bag. So officers try to collect some sample. Why do they say it's obviously e-waste? Because you look at this, you will see so many like cable and metal mix here.
Some spring and boards.
They don't have a license to import electronic waste and they don't have a license to do electronic sorting and no license for electronic recycle as well or moving the hazardous waste as well. So they violate many laws. And the woman who heads the ministry team is still...
grilling the manager of the site to find out what's going on here. Eventually, they tell the man that he and his Chinese associates are likely to be prosecuted, and we leave. The Thai government says that it conducts dozens of raids, inspections every month on factories like this, which it suspects are operating illegally and processing electronic waste, e-waste.
Electronic waste, of course, is not just a Thai problem. It's global, as my colleague Ruth Alexander explains. According to the United Nations, the world produces over 60 million tonnes of electrical and electronic waste each year, twice as much as 15 years ago. And that's projected to grow by more than 30% by the end of the decade.
Less than a quarter of it is collected and recycled responsibly. The rest ends up in landfill or gets broken up informally with risks to human health and the environment from mercury, lead and toxic fumes. Responsible recycling isn't keeping up with the size of the problem. We're generating e-waste five times faster than the rate at which we're recycling it.
Some of this waste, about 8% of the world total, gets sent abroad. The UN says two-thirds of that international trade is uncontrolled, meaning it's not clear where the waste ends up or what's done with it. And this is big business. Millions of dollars worth of copper, gold, aluminium and rare elements are salvaged from e-waste each year.
In Asia, China banned the import of e-waste in 2018, meaning people had to send it elsewhere. Many turned their attention to Thailand. It introduced its own import ban in 2020. But still, e-waste keeps coming. During the last few years, we've seen influx of illegal electronic waste imports coming into this country. That's Thailand's industry minister, Akanat Promphan. I met him in Bangkok.
Thailand is not getting anything from these businesses at all. There's no value to the economy. It destroys the environment. It poses threat and endanger the livelihood of the people. So we are very serious, and I form a special task force to engage in a full-on crackdown on these businesses. Do we know where it's coming from?
All over the world, the ones that we have found came mostly from Europe and the United States, in fact. How about China? Because if we look at the history of this issue, China used to be a recipient of electronic waste. Then China imposed its own ban. Is China now exporting some of its waste to Thailand?
I think the flow is in a different direction, mostly coming from the United States, from the European Union coming into Thailand, being processed in Thailand and exported out to China. Because China, there is a demand for precious metals because the economy is growing. And so we've seen being extracted here in Thailand and export out to China. So China is the end of the supply chain? Yes, it's the receiver. We're a pathway for illegal business. And
and the loss in value in domestic economy is huge. So we've talked about imports, but it's not just about imports, it's about processing in Thailand. Can you talk a little bit about those processing plants, many of which are operating illegally? We saw some of them when we were on a trip with the ministry to Chonburi. Who is setting up these plants? Who's running them?
I think these plants came in 2016, 2017, 2018. They receive waste from outside this country, which is illegal. Those businesses have expanded to what becomes a sort of a garbage site, an international garbage processing facility in Thailand, which is not what we want at all. Who owns these plants? The ones that we have found are mostly foreign, a lot of them Chinese.
And have you spoken to the authorities in China and indeed in the European Union and the United States about this problem of e-waste coming into the country and, in the case of the Chinese, of plants being set up illegally in Thailand?
Yes, we've spoken extensively to representatives of government from different nations. There's a public outcry. This doesn't go unnoticed. For the last three or four months that the ministry have engaged in the crackdown, there's a public outcry about how these people
can exist in Thailand for so long. Thai Industry Minister Akanat Pram Pham there. I contacted the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and asked for a response to the minister's assertion that many of the unlicensed plants in Thailand are Chinese-owned. But I didn't receive a response. This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
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Now, you remember that gravel that I saw back at the recycling plant, that kind of ground-up electronic waste? Well, that all has to be smelted down to get the valuable metals out of it. And it's a dirty business. I went to talk to a farmer who lives close to one of the unlicensed smelting plants that have popped up in eastern Thailand in recent years.
His name is Sing. He's 58 years old. He lives with his dogs in a one-storey wooden house next to a plot of land where he grows cassava. OK, he sit here. You want to sit there? Come around here, it's all right. Yeah.
He tells me he's been living there since long before the factory was there. At first, it was just one building, but it's grown and grown since then, and there are now about seven buildings. He says it wasn't a problem at first, but over the past couple of years, he's really felt the impact. And what has that impact been?
The worst thing, he says, is the terrible smell from the plant, especially at night, which is when it seems they smelt the e-waste. It's so bad you just can't sleep, he tells me. And if you walk past the factory when they're smelting, you have to hold your breath. The fumes are so strong. He says it's affected his crops too. His cassava plants don't flower like they used to and his harvests are smaller. And have you tried to talk to the factory owners about these problems?
He says he has, but that they just don't seem to care and they just carry on, bringing more and more e-waste into the site and it's just getting worse and worse. He says he's reported it to the local authorities, but that after he did, he received verbal threats from the factory owners. Is there anything more that you can do to resolve these problems, do you think?
He says he feels there's nothing more he can do. He's already reported it so many times. He says no-one seems to be dealing with the problem. What are local people supposed to do, he asks. DOG BARKS
Environmentalists have raised the alarm about these problems. Jim Puckett spent 14 years at Greenpeace working on the issue of toxic waste. These days he's a director of the Basel Action Network, an NGO campaigning on the same issue. Thailand has really borne the brunt of so much of what's gone on. This is a net negative if you import this very dirty material for recycling. You are going to contaminate your soil, your people.
You open up a computer, you pull out the circuit board, you think this is no big deal, this is not going to hurt anybody. But what happens is they grind this material up, they breathe the dust, and then worse, they send it off to a smelter
a very primitive smelter with no pollution controls. And when you burn circuit boards, you have the brominated flame retardants in there that make brominated dioxins, some of the most toxic persistent organic pollutants that the whole community and certainly the workforce is going to be breathing. We've seen these dioxin factories, as we call them, in Thailand, one after the other, and they're right in the farmland. This is what's happening whenever you set up these little factories.
BBC. Gideon. In a cafe in Bangkok, I meet Penchom Saitang, a local activist and the head of an organisation called Earth Thailand.
It says the amount of e-waste coming into Thailand has soared from under 3,000 tonnes in 2017 before the Chinese ban on imports to over 60,000 tonnes now. Many places have been suffering from the negative impact from e-waste. And if we think of these people who are working at these sites and recycling this e-waste, do you have proof that it has affected their health?
Harmful for human beings, also harmful for the land, for the soil, for the environment as well. Exactly, yes.
Many of Thailand's e-waste problems come from abroad. Illicitly imported waste from Europe and the US and unlicensed Chinese-owned recycling factories. But Thais are also partly to blame for the rising mound of electronic waste in their country. As they've grown wealthier over the past generation or so, they've bought more gadgets and got rid of their old ones. I asked Thais on the streets of Bangkok what they do with their old mobile phones.
I cleared all my memory then I give it to someone else. Mostly I give it out to my relatives.
I used to sell it, but for the past couple of devices, I just leave it at home. Do you ever think of recycling it? The thoughts actually came to my mind for a few times, but then I forgot about that. And what about passing your devices on to other members of your family or friends? I don't, but I used to use the phone that was passed from my mother. Quite a stupid thing to do. I keep it.
Because I'd rather not to give away my property. I'd rather to keep it and die with me. You never recycle your products? I give away to my mom. Oh, so you give your old phone to your mom? Yes, yes, yes. She don't need the new technology anyway. I give to my mom.
I'm not doing anything with them, not selling, not, you know. Okay, so you don't pass them on to anybody else? No, nobody seems to want my phone. Would you ever give your phone away to somebody or try and recycle it? That never came to my mind, but since you proposed, I think I just consider maybe giving them to somebody else who needs them.
And what about your old computers? What do you do with those? Do you keep them? No, yes, they're still home. They're still sitting at home? Yes. Maybe you should think about recycling those as well. I know! Thank you!
The tech industry says it's working on these issues. The Information Technology Industry Council is a global trade association representing some of the biggest names in the sector, the likes of Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. It told me in a statement that the industry was committed to addressing electronic waste and its environmental impact. That includes our ongoing efforts to encourage proper e-waste processing and curb dumping across the globe, it said.
In some parts of the world, governments have passed laws to try and make sure gadgets are recycled once they reach the end of their life. The Thai government has promised to follow suit. Industry Minister Akanat Promphan again. New products will be charged an amount. That amount will be placed in the fund and when the products come to its end of life, money will be taken out of the fund to encourage or promote those products to be processed properly or to be recycled to something of value.
Any idea when this legislation might be passed? I think it will probably enter the Parliament sometime this year and I'm hoping for the enactment of this new legislation as soon as possible, maybe towards the end of this year, maybe at the beginning of next year. In the meantime, the battle goes on and I'm fully committed to take full actions against this illegal business and drive them out completely.
We'll be following that battle here on Business Daily to see how Thailand deals with its e-waste problem. And we'll be staying in Thailand tomorrow when my colleague Ed Butler looks at the government's plans to relax the laws on gambling. For now, though, that's all from me, Gideon Long. My thanks to all my guests and to you too for listening. Goodbye.