Amazing way Chinese recycle millions of cellphones every year

It's a shame that most e-waste recycling in China is not as clean and neat as this. Case in point, the town of Guiyu:<p><a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_1822148,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162_182214...</a> <a href="http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php#" rel="nofollow">http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n9/htdocs/ctrl.php#</a><p>(Don't get me wrong, responsible e-waste recycling is to be lauded and encouraged - it's all the more important because of places like Guiyu. I'm not too surprised Nokia choose to focus on one angle while not really mentioning the other one, though.)

Garbage sorters in HK isn't a sight I've 100% gotten used to. It is extremely common (somewhere around 1 every 2KM you walk - and those are just the ones you catch actually at a garbage). They are mostly after cardboard from what I've seen - or maybe that's just what they find the most of.<p>As a general rule, they are all old and don't look particularly healthy. But they are hard working. I feel equal measures of shame and pride in humanity when I see one. It's actually an emotional experience for me for some weird reason.<p>I wish I knew more about them. What they earn, how long they work, how the system works (they seem to have local drop off centers which all have floor scales - so it must be paid by weight, and then it gets shipped off from there by god knows who).

They are screwed when their middle-class gets big enough to cause inflation and labor is no longer cheap enough to abuse people like that.<p>They'll have to double the size of their prisons and use prison labor, and yet we'll keep buying.

Everything is possible in China because of wage slavery <a href="http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-apple-workers-forced-to-sign-no-suicide-pledge/20110504.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-...</a>

This is fantastic. Disassembled all the way down to the capacitors... If these parts are resold and reused, I don't think anyone could hope for better, short of a way to decompose and reuse PCB, or at the very least harvest the copper.

Yay! Another variety of sweatshop. Those chips have to be worth, what, 0.02?

Someday, robots will be doing this with virtually everything tossed away. And they'll be taking apart our old landfills too.

Recycle is nice until your electronic brakes fail because the manufacturer was sold these parts as new. Old HK saying "Only the con man is real."

Sounds like Nokia palming off its RoHS obligations to a cottage economy which luckily for them seems to be thriving. You couldn't do this in Europe or America.