The air pollution generated at electronics waste dismantling sites may have a dangerous impact on the health of nearby residents.
Researchers have found what could be a possible health risk to those living close to a giant e-waste dismantling industrial park in China. Tests of local air pollution and its impact on human lung cells revealed inflammatory responses and oxidative stress, which could lead to DNA damage, cardiovascular disease or cancer.
The study, published Tuesday in Environmental Research Letters, comes amid heightened publicity surrounding e-waste, a term used to describe the mountains of unwanted or obsolete electronic devices that pile up annually. As GreenBiz.com Managing Editor Matthew Wheeland described last week, e-waste can potentially complicate the green agendas of electronics companies, a risk some firms are trying to avoid. Sprint, for example, announced last Thursday several e-waste goals, including its plan to collect 100 percent of its own e-waste by 2017.
Some estimate that globally, as much as 50 million tons of e-waste are generated every year, laden with lead, copper, tin, and in some cases, mercury, and cadmium, among other materials. A significant chunk of e-waste generated in developed countries is sent overseas to developing nations where lax laws or primitive dismantling techniques often make recycling anything but environmentally friendly.
Some of these heavy metals and other pollutants can be released into the air during dismantling. For the study, researchers used human lung epithelial cells grown in a lab, not those of people living near the e-waste industrial park in Taizhou, in Zhejiang province. About 60,000 people in the area process more than two million tons of e-waste annually.
“Most of the dismantling workers and local residents lived in or around the dismantling industrial park,” the study said. “They were incessantly exposed to polluted air, without any protection. An unpublished survey has revealed that diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and various cancers have become more common during the past few decades in the area.”
More study is needed, according the researchers, which include: Fangxing Yang, of Zhejiang University; Shiwei Jin, of China’s Key Laboratory for Green Chemical Process at the Ministry of Education; Ying Xu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrobiology; and Yuanan Lu from the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii.
