Clouds of toxic poison are released into the air and water in rural Chinese villages where residents use medieval tactics to disassemble and reclaim metal from electronics.

But that's China, and this is the United States. That's not happening here in New Mexico, right?

Wrong.

Last year, the state Environment Department investigated a business in Alamogordo and found its proprietor had crudely burned computer circuit boards in a manner that could have posed a health risk to those who live nearby.

The business has now cleaned up and moved away, but its existence is a warning for state regulators who seldom hear about such operations.

If it had not been for Elaine Martinez, EEM Scrap might still be using its experimental smelting tactics. When Martinez got a new neighbor, and that neighbor started storing and processing electronic waste, she started to worry. After she was diagnosed with kidney cancer that doctors said was commonly associated with industrial chemicals, she had had enough.

She filed complaints with the Environment Department that led to EEM Scrap voluntarily closing its doors.

"I would wake up and feel sick to my stomach and have a bad headache," she said in a recent interview. "It smelled like a bleachy type chemical kind of plastic smell."

Inspectors from the department visited the business, and in correspondence that led to the visit, proprietor James Dinsdale admitted to burning circuit boards in an effort to extract precious metals. In a period of several months, he created about 200 pounds of metal by burning an unknown number of circuit boards. Other stockpiles of materials at the business also posed a threat, investigators said.

He was issued a notice that he had violated state laws by "burning materials without an air quality permit, improper handling and disposal of material, not having an EPA permit," failing to identify hazardous waste in slag materials and other rules.

Dinsdale agreed to cease the activities and to clean up his land, but according to correspondence obtained by The New Mexican through a records request, he did so grudgingly.

"My neighbor is nutty and has nothing do but worry about me actually working and having a life," he wrote in one e-mail last July.

"I'm just fed up with how all of this was handled ... if I had to wait on a permit for everything I did in the process of invention, I would die of old age," he wrote.

Efforts to reach Dinsdale were unsuccessful.

Although Martinez lost a kidney after her diagnosis, she has not taken any legal action about the ordeal. The Environment Department also denies there was empirical evidence that the illegal smelting could have led to her illness.

"Had he done this for longer than he did ... we'd have had a really bad long-term problem," reads an e-mail from an investigator with the Air Quality Bureau who also theorized that residents nearby may have been exposed to high toxic ambient-air concentrations during periods of burning.

Because the department did not take air samples during the burning, however, no air-quality violation notices were issued.

James Bearzi, who heads the department's Hazardous Waste Bureau, said the outcome in this case was acceptable.

"This is not the kind of problem that would rise to the level of assessing civil penalties. We got voluntary compliance and determined there was not a threat to human health or to the environment," he said.

It's rare that officials receive reports of such operations, he noted, but when they do, investigations are always ordered.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.