Piles of electronic waste head up in front of the houses in Guiyu. (Photo : Wikimedia)
The southern Chinese town of Guiyu has ordered recycling firms in the area to move to an industrial park by the end of 2015.
Located in Guangdong Province, the city began recycling electronic trash in the 1980s. Currently, the area has been laid waste by the said business. Annually, there are around 100,000 people employed to recycle 450,000 tons of televisions, computers and other gadgets.
The thousands of workshops involved in the industry have taken toll on the city's soil, water and air. The town is suffocated by smog and piles of scrap head up in front of the residents' houses.
"The river used to be strongly acidic, and copper levels in the riverbed sludge were almost on a par with copper mines," said environmental protection bureau director Huang Tengyuan of Shantou City, which administers Guiyu.
By the end of November, over 400 large workshops have been closed by the government, according to Lin Dingliang, head of Chaoyang District of Shantou. He added that there are still more than 3,000 workshops left operating in the area.
Data further shows that compared with 2012 figures, Guiyu's air's heavy mental content has declined by 94 percent in the first three quarters of 2015. Meanwhile, copper, nickel and lead contents dropped by 94, 78 and 37 percent, respectively.
However, the relocation ordered by the local government to a sub-industrial park opened in 2013 has not gone entirely smoothly.
A workshop owner named Cheng shared that "it costs almost twice as much to rent a workshop in the park as outside, and there are more transportation fees."
For experts from the Sun Yat-sen University's environmental science research institute, favorable prices and better services are needed to encourage owners to move to the park.
