Still under construction, but please look around and leave comments, etc....
Inside and Outside ZEPIP (Ziya Environmental Protection Industry Park)
I
recall taking this picture from the car window on my first visit to Ziya in 2006 mainly because I remember the shock I felt first encountering these massive cubes of electronic waste, like Borg ships that had suddenly fallen out of the sky into the luxurious summer grass of the countryside. I had hired a cab driver for the day in downtown Tianjin and had dragged him an hour and a half out of the city. Neither of us had any idea where the Ziya Environmental Protection Industrial Park (ZEPIP) was, and back in those days cabs didn't have GPS, so we wandered the country roads and through village clusters stopping passersby to ask for directions. Few people had ever heard of the place. But then we suddenly started seeing these cubes, like space wreckage dropped out of the blue. It took me a minute to realize these were scrap yards of imported waste wire; actually I later learned that these weren't really scrap yards but actioning sites where loads of wire from Tianjin's port were hauled to be auctioned off to folks who would take them to their yards for processing.We soon came across those processing yards, easily identified by their long brick walls (to hide the activities inside) covered in slogans like this one: “Protect the environment, build prosperity for the next generation.”
In these yards, either unpaved or with a brick ground-cover, wires were sorted and then stripped to create separate piles of copper and plastic. The superfines--the thinest hard-to-strip wires--were burned at night, as a quick peek through the yards' gates made clear.
Indeed, if you want a strong argument for the success of ZEPIP in helping clean up the horribly toxic practice of wire burning in the Ziya area, a time-lapse comparison of Google Earth satellite images of Ziya from 2003 to 2015 illustrates how endemic the problem of open burning was and how effective ZEPIP was in helping end it.
The first image below, from 2003, shows an area in Ziya where dozens of yards engaged in open burning. Google Earth images reveal at least two others similarly sized clusters like this (and dozens of individual sites peppered about the area). Images 2, 3, and 4 show how a second such cluster changed over the years from 2003-2015. By 2011 or so evidence of burning was mostly gone from the Ziya area.
But also over these same years the size of the territory managed by ZEPIP expanded enormously. If we pull back to a larger satellite shot of Ziya and its neighboring villages, we see that ZEPIP managed projects are taking up a lot more land than was needed for waste wire and imported scrap metal processing yards. In 2008 Ziya area informal village processors I interviewed told me they and their neighbors were all being forced off their land by ZEPIP's expansion plan. By 2105 ZEPIP had taken over the better part of the township, moving local residents into a housing compound. In other words, ZEPIP also looks like a typical example of a national wave of local governments expropriating rural residents' land and flipping it for a high profit corporate rents.
From here I'd like to add a few observations and critiques regarding ZEPIP that I did not have room to include in Remains of the Everyday, evidence that leads me to see ZEPIP as primarily driven by land expropriation interests rather than by a search for the most effective approach to mitigate pollution related to imported waste processing. ZEPIP's one clear environmental achievement was stopping rampant wire burning in the region, and that is certainly significant. But a far simpler and less expensive intervention could have achieved that outcome while actually helping Ziya's local entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Instead, the ZEPIP model resulted in punishing local entrepreneurs and enriching government functionaries and connected corporate interests. To make this argument I need to first show how small the difference was between the waste wire processing happening inside ZEPIP and that happening outside its walls in the informal sector.
What happened inside the walls of ZEPIP? The homepage picture for this Scalar site was taken inside a ZEPIP enterprise. It's a shot of an unsorted wire load that hopefully gives the viewer some sense of the huge scale of the imported waste wire market Ziya entrepreneurs had created which ZEPIP enterprises were now tapping with government support.
The image below shows another part of that same enterprise's yard, where a similar pile was being processed. ZEPIP enterprises contracted out the processing work to experienced migrant workers who were paid piece wages according to the weight of insulation stripped (workers handed over all stripped copper and plastic to the enterprise to sell). These workers first sorted the heap into separate piles according to the wires' thickness and the kind of metal encased, then stripped the sorted wire using small mechanical strippers (owned by the workers, not provided by the company). The well-paved grounds reduced possible ground water pollution, and the awning could protect the materials and workers from some weather damage. Otherwise there was no difference between wire processing inside ZEPIP and in the informal village yards.
The only other difference was what happened to superfines. These were pretty much the only wires informal processors burned; it's more profitable to strip a wire and be able to sell both the cleaned copper and plastic as scrap, but after burning the only salable product is scorched copper. While informal processor burned superfines, ZEPIP enterprises were all required to have an automated wire shredder like the one pictured below (note that the shredder merits the building of an enclosed warehouse, the workers apparently don't). The pictures here show the shredder and then shots of its bagged output--very pure streams of copper and plastic.
The machine uses air blowers and a shaker to conjure the magic of specific gravity, beautifully routing copper bits the size of grains of sand into one shoot, and plastic shred into another. But the viewer might notice something from these pictures (all of which I took on my 2006 tour): the shredder is staged. It isn't turned on and no workers are there. It's been set up so a viewer on tour, like me, can see how it works. My point is not that the shredder was useless, but that it was hardly used; it was as much for show as use. That is because, by requiring all ZEPIP wire processing enterprises to buy these huge machines, there was a ridiculous over-capacity of shredders in ZEPIP. Except when processing superfines, it was still far cheaper and more efficient to have migrant workers hand-strip wires with their small mechanical strippers rather than fire up the shredder and pay for it's high electrical costs etc. Hence the joke I heard over and over from ZEPIP company managers, that human labor is the most environmentally protective technology (最环保的技术还是人力).
The vast majority of enterprises in ZEPIP did wire processing; aside from a couple of aluminum scrap sorting enterprises, wire stripping was the stock and trade of the 70+ enterprises in the park. And, as I pointed out in the book, the copper ZEPIP enterprises produced was sold to Jinghai's local highly polluting copper refineries while the plastic insulation scrap, coated in toxic flame retardants, was trucked 40 km down the road to Wenan, and, after 2011 when Wenan was shut down, about 100 km west to Baoding.
So ZEPIP in no way reduced the pollution at those next steps in the copper and plastic recycling chains; and though its enterprises had the financial capacity to scale up far larger and faster than local village wire stripping shops, that scaling up sparked no innovation at all.
It's easy to imagine a much simpler solution to Ziya's wire burning disaster. The government could have purchased two or three automated shredders and opened a shop that specialized in shredding superfines. They could have purchased superfines at a subsidized price that made it more profitable for local yards to sell their superfines than burn them. At the same time they could then have actually enforced a burning ban; once local scrap yards had no excuse to burn wire, if they were caught doing so they could be shut down. Such a program would have done nothing to solve all the other environmental problems associated with waste wire processing after the stripping stage; it would have done nothing to end the toxic pollution of reprocessing plastic wire insulation that was part of the nightmarish conditions down the road in waste plastic processing hub of Wenan county. Then again, ZEPIP did nothing to solve that problem either, and arguably ZEPIP's rapid expansion only accelerated Wenan's environmental devastation. A policy of the kind I am suggesting would also have helped the rural wire-stripping entrepreneurs grow their businesses and enter the formal economy. Instead the ZEPIP approach criminalized local entrepreneurs and displaced them while channeling hundreds of millions of yuan in financing into the hands of state connected power brokers.