Just to warm you up to the topic and before I get into the concept of environmental remediation of e-waste I want to shape our background for this discussion.
First, what is e-waste?
Electronic waste, whole, partial or components of broken, unwanted, extra, or obsolete electronic devices and the batteries and cables that run them.
According to the EPA e-waste is the fastest growing segment of the municipal waste stream. Computers, cell phones, and televisions make up a large segment of this stream. With 1.9millon tons of e-waste being discarded in the United States and only 10% of that stream being partially recycled, this becomes a serious public issue. Not just because of the extra waste, but because of the toxic dangers hidden within these technologies.
Electronic waste contains heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, beryllium and brominates, know carcinogens and harmful to our environmental systems. It also contains valuable commodities such as copper, steel, and gold. The challenge in recycling these metals out is two fold. First, many of them are highly toxic and require specialized equipment and expensive processes to extract properly. Secondly, they are in small amounts fused to other metals or to various types of plastics, again causing expensive and potentially toxic recycling processes.
Electronic waste is not just recycled in its country of disposal, although it is against the Basel Convention treaty much of a developed nations e-waste is illegally exported to developing nations. China, India, and multiple African countries receive millions of tons of e-waste annually. This is a health and safety issue not just for portions of those societies that handle and deconstruct various types of e-waste without any personal safety devices. There is often no larger protection of metals leaching into the water systems or the atmospheric pollutants from open burnings of the plastic components to remove the metals.
With the rapid change in the latest electronics and planned obsolescence within those devices Electronic waste is an environmental and social issue that demands attention.
To test your knowledge and find links to help shore up those weaker areas in your e-waste knowledge follow the link below to a quick online quiz.
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/games-quizzes/ewaste-iq-quiz/
Wow nice post Tomas! Love the picture. Here in Poulsbo there is a place we can take our old computer screens and TV's and god knows what happens to them.
ReplyDeleteHey Tomas,
ReplyDeleteI am so glad you are looking into this. Seems to me the ultimate answers will have to come from upstream, in a design process that facilitates easier separation of materials, and perhaps can create new methods of manufacture that use fewer toxins to begin with. Very evocative photo.