So your old computer is at the end of its life. It crashes every ten minutes. The hard drive makes a terrible crunching sound. The monitor is all pink in the upper left corner. It’s time for an upgrade but first what do we do with the old computer?

As a socially conscious person you don’t want that computer to be sitting in a landfill till the end of time so you send it to an electronics recycler. Being an IT tech I see a lot of equipment reach its end of life. I’ve filled dumpsters with junk computers to be sent to an electronics recycling company.

Where does all that junk go? It goes here:

It tends to go to third world countries where it is dismantled crudely by poor workers in extremely dangerous conditions. The picture above is of a recycling center in rural China.

While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.

“It is being recycled, but it’s being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine,” said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. “We’re preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world.”