In Guiyu Township, Chaoyang County, Guangdong, the average yield for potato is 9.75 t/ha and for winter sweetpotato yield is about 17.25 t/ha.

Following up news articles and e-mails from mainland China, BAN was directed to an e-waste processing area known as Guiyu on the Longdong River near the city of Shantou in the northeast [of] Guangdong Province, four hours by car from Hong Kong. In the course of three intensive days in and around Guiyu's four villages, the small investigative team witnessed firsthand what passes for recycling of e-waste in Asia.

On a recent morning in Guiyu, in Guangdong province, hundreds of men squatted in concrete-block sheds, sifting through computers and printers and breaking them into scrap with their bare hands.

The residents of Guiyu, including children, make their living sorting, dismantling and burning computer parts or bathing them in nitric and hydrochloric acids to recover precious metals.

On seemingly every street, laborers sit on the pavement outside workshops ripping out the guts of household appliances with hammers and drills. The roads in Guiyu are lined with bundles of plastic, wires, cables and other garbage.

GUIYU, China (Reuters) - The dizzying stench of burning plastic still drifts through the alleys, workshops and warehouses of Guiyu, the southern Chinese town that has long symbolized China’s role as the main recycler of the world’s waste.…In the 2000s, Guiyu became a symbol of the environmental devastation caused by recycling hazardous waste with little regulation after being singled out by groups like Greenpeace and featuring in a string of international media reports. Trash is still the mainstay of Guiyu’s economy, but hundreds of recycling businesses have been consolidated or shut completely in recent years and authorities are now cracking down on smuggled waste, further starving small and polluting businesses of supplies. “Although the dismantling of old electronics is the leading industry in Guiyu, we should say it was more a profession than an industry,” said Zheng Jinxiong, vice chairman of a government commission tasked with running the recycling industry park, set up on the edge of town.

Before writing his debut novel, The Waste Tide, a 2013 eco-thriller about a workers’ uprising in a futuristic dump called Silicon Isle, Chen spent time in the southeastern city of Guiyu, one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for electronic waste, observing migrant workers toil in the toxin-laden trash.

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