In the cities like the southern Chinese town of Guiyu, they work with little protection, melting down components and breathing in poisonous fumes. “I saw people putting leftover parts on coal fired stoves, to melt down the waste to get to the gold,” he says. The U.S. is by far the world’s top producer of e-waste, but much of it laptop repair computer services ends up elsewhere — specifically, in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was established by the UN in 1989 to control the hazardous garbage flowing from rich countries to poor ones. “It’d produce a reddish smoke that was so strong I couldn’t stand there for more than a couple minutes before my eyes would just burn.” (Hear Zhao talk about the e-waste on this week’s Greencast.) Urban China is so polluted that few Chinese escape without some damage to their health, but Zhao says that local researchers have found that the children of Guiyu fare worse than their counterparts in nearby cities, suffering from respiratory illnesses traced back to e-waste.