Informant38

women squat on the sidewalk using their bare hands to pull apart the hazardous guts of a small mountain of PCs.

This is where many of America's computers go to die.

In the Pearl River Delta less than 180 miles away, in factories as immaculate as Guiyu is filthy, growing legions of young women work up to 18 hours a day, soldering chips and wires to motherboards, making the PC boxes that one day will bear the name of Hewlett-Packard or Dell or IBM.

This is where the world's personal computers are born.

A computer may spend its working days in a comfortable home in Boston or in a programmer's cubicle in San Jose. But at both ends, the dirty work behind a typical PC's life is done in China. This is the dark secret of a famously ``clean industry.''
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Re:I Have But One Word for Computer Recycling: Give it to a school. Get the tax rebate.
Who do they contact for a replacement? The fly-by-night Pricewatch vendor you bought it from? What are they going to use your Pentium 133 for, anyways? They're not going to be doing any physics simulations on it. You want to explain to them why they should make this the lone Linux PC in their entire computer lab? Especially after they see how horribly slow KDE runs with 32MB RAM and a 2MB video card that doesn't have XF86 4.x drivers...