A frontier police officer from Shenzhen in Guangdong Province walks on a hill piled up with smuggled used clothes on August 9. (Photo/Xinhua)
Shenzhen frontier police tracked down a network of illegal smugglers engaged in smuggling tons of used clothes from Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, revealed the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Frontier Corps on August 11.
The group consists of six suspects, five from Taiwan and one from the Chinese mainland, who smuggled 549 tons of used clothes from Hong Kong using a cargo ship named Liyunda with a total value of some 11 million yuan (U.S.$1.65 million).
"We bought these used clothes at an average price of two or three yuan each and sold them for dozens or hundreds of yuan after simply cleaning and refurbishing them," a suspect confessed.
However, after investigation, the police found that most of the used clothes were collected from a garbage dump or scrap station, while some were even taken from the hospital morgues, which contain a large number of bacteria.
Experts said that all the used clothes had not been disinfected or quarantined before selling, which often contain bacteria that could cause itches, gastric disease or even genital infection. Most importantly, the children's and babies' garments sold would surely harm the children's health and become a source of infection of a range of diseases.
According to related Chinese regulations, "overseas garbage" includes electronic trash, household and medical garbage, industrial slag, construction waste and used clothes, which can't be recycled and are prohibited from being imported, sold and used throughout the country.
