A massive e-waste landfill in Guiyu, in southern China's Guangdong province, is much more than a graveyard for old computers, says an investigative US writer based in Shanghai
Electronic waste can be highly toxic and needs to be disposed safely.
Adam Minter, author of the Shanghai Scrap blog, says he found boxes of defective but unused electronic components discarded at Guiyu - still in the original packaging from HP, Panasonic and Samsung.
But Samsung Electronics denies any involvement in discarding the equipment, and says the components were manufactured many years ago.
HP and Panasonic did not comment on the specifics of the case.
Mr Minter himself says that most of the e-waste dumped in China does not come from the West as before, but from Asia and especially China itself.
The writer has highlighted the e-waste issue many times before, not only on his blog, but writing for publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American.
The town of Guiyu, made up of four small villages on the South China Sea coast, first made headlines in the early 2000s, as one of the places where old computers and gadgets from the western world were getting recycled.
A steady stream of used electronics started to arrive from about 1995 and made Guiyu one of the world's largest electronic waste sites. Read more:
