We make a great deal of e-waste.
When electronics end up in landfills, toxins like lead, mercury, and cadmium leach into the dirt and water.
The electronic waste problem is huge: More than 48 million tons of e-waste are produced every year. On the off chance that you put every blue whale alive today on one side of a scale and one year of US e-waste (6.9 million tons) on the other, the e-waste would be heavier. Electronic Waste Management.
E-waste is worldwide.
Some e-waste is shipped overseas, where it is burned for scrap by kids in junkyards. We visited a scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, and met some really great children in a terrible circumstance. They didn't have the foggiest idea of how poisonous their activity really is.
Even along these lines, encouraging a worldwide market for used electronics does more great than hurt:
1) Repaired electronics give people access to ease electronics and help them access the awesome benefits of technology.
2) Used electronics create repair occupations in developing countries that often have few opportunities for skilled workers.
3) Reuse in developing countries is normally more effective than domestic recycling—there's a sorry market for old cathode beam tube screens in the US, for example, yet they are reused in other countries.
The worldwide utilization of electronics is increasing. Every year we create more e-waste than before. In any event half of Africa's e-waste comes from inside the continent. China disposes of 750 million electronic devices a year.
We create a lot of e-waste and reuse excessively little. Electronic Waste Management.
Our waste electronics are contaminating drinking water and hurting ecosystems around the globe. It's time to fix the problem.
It's time to fix the e-waste problem.
We need more e-waste repair and refurbishment, worldwide. We need to take a page from the book of expert repairers in developing countries. We need to quit discarding computers that could be fixed with a 25-cent part.
What's halting us? Awful repair manuals are a major factor. Every gadget is different. The harder it is to figure out the problem, the more likely someone is to give up and decide to replace the machine instead. Electronic Waste Management.
0 Comments