Your ‘Recycled’ Laptop May Be Incinerated In An Illegal Asian Scrapyard

"They call it “e-waste recycling.” But what happens inside Asia’s underground scrapyards looks more like crude alchemy.

Men and women, faces swaddled in cloth, hunch over steel furnaces. They melt down electronic guts ripped out of laptops and TVs. Under intense heat, gold and copper fused to circuit boards get soft and runny — and can be scraped into basins full of scalding, metallic sludge.

Once it cools, this sludge has value. There’s actually way more gold in 1 ton of computer scrap than in many tons of gold ore. But this process brings terrible costs, namely to human bodies."

Patrick Winn reports for PRI's The World May 21, 2019.