Title: What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem?
Headings: What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem?
General Earth Institute
What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem?
Why the upsurge in e-waste?
What’s in e-waste?
The state of e-waste recycling
What U.S. laws govern e-waste?
A problem requiring multiple solutions
Designing better products
The right to repair
Extended Producer Responsibility
More convenient recycling
Better recycling
The goal of a circular economy
What you can do about e-waste
Resources
60 Minutes: The Wasteland (e-waste in China)
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Content: Andrew Magill
But electronic devices also comprise toxic heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium and beryllium, polluting PVC plastic, and hazardous chemicals, such as brominated flame retardants, which can harm human health and the environment. In 2016, the estimated value of recoverable materials in global e-waste was $64.6 billion, but only 20 percent of it was properly recycled to enable recovery of the valuable materials. Much of the rest is dumped in landfills where toxic chemicals can leach from the e-waste and end up contaminating the water supply. As more people buy electronic equipment, manufacturers are beginning to face shortages of the raw materials needed to make their products, so reclaiming and reusing the materials from discarded products and waste—a process called urban mining—makes economic and environmental sense. A recent study in China found that mining copper, gold and aluminum from ore costs 13 times more than recovering the metals through the urban mining of e-waste. The state of e-waste recycling
Recycling e-waste is practiced both formally and informally. Proper or formal e-waste recycling usually involves disassembling the electronics, separating and categorizing the contents by material and cleaning them. Formal recycling in Rwanda. Photo: Rwanda Green Fund
Items are then shredded mechanically for further sorting with advanced separation technologies.