Public Health and the illegal E-waste industry in China—alternative visions from urban planning and landscape design.

Abstract

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is historically the manufacturing heartland of China and currently hosts some of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. Guiyu, a town located in the southern coast of PRD, is the largest e-waste destination in the world. Approximately 60-80% of families in Guiyu are active in the e-waste recycling business. The recycling operations are primitive, including manual sorting, firing, incinerating, acidic/alkaline bathing, disassembling, burning of plastic materials, and strong acid leaching. These illegal workshops offer limited to no protection for workers through established environmental and labor regulations, further endangering the long-term well-being of the workers and surrounding residents. We investigated the social, economic and environmental impacts caused by the E-waste industry in the Guiyu Township. We explored new regional visions of the ecological and social environment through urban design and landscape strategies. These interventions were developed by working on critical issues simultaneously at multiple scales with the ultimate goal to design spatial interventions that critiqued current urban planning practices, improved public health, and addressed social inequity. The research unfolds in three stages: first is to understand the regional geographies of electronics industries by tracking the components and lifecycle of a smart phone; in the second stage, we conducted structured interviews and fieldwork for sites in the PRD heavily intertwined with the electronic industry; in the third stage, we developed planning and design strategies and techniques to promote healthy landscape and healthy people at the regional, city and site scales.