'60 Minutes': Walking through a toxic village Video

'60 Minutes': Walking through a toxic village Video Transcript

>> This is an entire village of electronic components. It's the most amazing thing.

>> And the scary thing is they're -- what they do here is they burn it to get the little bit of copper out and the value of copper is going skyrocketing, so this is the type of trade that's really taken off, but it's a very dirty job they're doing here. Here's a computer case from Sun Microsystems, there's an old Apple Mac. This is all -- here's an old Apple five hundred quarter inch disk drive, some of these stuff's...

>> Exactly. Old and obsolete.

>> Old scraps.

>> You know when you burn these stuff I wonder what gets released into the air?

>> What you're gonna create is much worst than the toxic material that you start out with, which is already toxic enough. It is a problem to get rid of and it takes real cost to manage that problem.

>> And getting rid of it in China is a whole lot cheaper.

>> Exactly.

>> Than disposing of it in the United States.

>> Exactly.

>> This stuff is filed up higher than our heads.

>> Yeah.

>> It is amazing.

>> There's so much plastic gonna be burned, it's gonna create very toxic materials. All this plastic has bromine in it to create flame retardants, so that when you burn that material and you try to combust it you create dioxins. The EPA has actually done studies in the laboratory to show what would happen if you burn this stuff in the open like they're doing here and they've found some of the highest levels of dioxins ever produced.

>> And dioxin does what to humans?

>> Cancer, cancer for humans, for animals, vey toxic that we're -- humans are looking at long term effects. ^M00:01:36