The Electronic Waste Recycling Challenge

Gadget shopping? Odds are that as soon as you plunk down money for a brand new smartphone or 9.7 inch tablet or 4K LED flatscreen television, a small part of your brain is already tracing its disposal. Rapid changes in engineering and consumer electronics have become the growing waste stream on earth. Recycling waste requires the capacity to extract, sort, dismantle, and to gather materials and metals from a whole selection of devices, while separating out hazardous and recyclable waste. For a huge scale recycler you need to have employees, a fleet of vehicles, government contracts, ample warehouse space, and loads of insurance.

Among the waste recyclers from the USA, ERI is one of seven facilities across the nation. The margins have exploded since getting into the business more than a decade ago. ERI recycles most of NY City’s waste, over 2 million lbs in 2015.

Currently, only 25 states in the United States have laws establishing a financing system for the collection and recycling of electronic products, in addition to bans against sending electronic to landfills. The US is the only developed country that hasn’t ratified an international treaty to stop First World nations from dumping their squander in developing countries. Therefore, mountains of poisonous US-established squander are growing at an exponential rate in countries like India, China, and South Africa. Exported e-squander has turned rivers in China black and also towns in Ghana in some of the world’s largest dumps.

The UN Environmental Program predicts that between 2007 and 2020, the amount of e-squander exported to India may jump by 500 percent, and also by 200 to 400 percent in South Africa and also China. Most Americans toss their old gadgets in the trash with last night’s dinner - In the meantime, all of our electronics are becoming smaller, more streamlined, and more challenging to recycle. Companies such as Apple, HP, Huawei, Amazon, and Microsoft use detailed protocols to recycle their products, but that only applies to items which are actually returned by customers. The remainder is left to recyclers such as ERI to attempt to bring some sanity into the process.

Source: pixabay.com