The introduction of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive could result in an explosion of 'toxic trading' — the dumping of environmentally hazardous waste on developing nations.

Electronic waste is already being shipped to Asia and India for recycling because of the cheap local labour. But experts believe that most of it is simply landfilled.

The practice of dumping hazardous waste on developing countries is prohibited under the Basel Convention, an agreement ratified by most developed countries. But when the WEEE directive becomes law, some experts say that meeting the cost and logistics of recycling vast amounts of obsolete equipment will prompt further flouting of the Convention and encourage unethical practices in a bid to save money.

A spokesman for South West Waste Management told EETimes: "A lot of material that is supposedly being recycled isn't. I have also heard that a lot of general waste is illegally dumped at sea, and we are going to see this moving over to the electronics sector once WEEE is introduced."

The US, which did not sign up to the 1989 agreement, has been exposed as a major toxic trader by a report published by Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

The report, Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, uncovered an area in Guangdong province, China, where around 100 000 migrant workers are employed to manually break up and process obsolete electronics waste imported primarily from North America.

Jim Puckett, BAN's co-ordinator, said: "We found a cyber-age nightmare. They call this recycling but it's really dumping by another name. Yet, to our horror, we discovered that, rather than banning it, the US government is actually encouraging this ugly trade to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the US daily."