For years, activists and the media have portrayed Guiyu as the natural outcome of foreign rapaciousness. To shut down the injustice, they implied, scrap recyclers just had to stop shipping computers to China. In retrospect, it was a simplistic message, even before China became the world’s largest consumer of computers. Today, though, it’s beyond simplistic: it’s willfully ignorant. Guiyu won’t be shut down because it stops receiving computers from abroad. It’ll be shut down if and when China manages to implement an environmentally secure electronics collection and recycling system for all of
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