Environmental disaster because of electronics

Walk into the first electronics store and the tiny MP3 players, multi-functional cell phones and mega-sized flat-screen TVs will beam you. All this high-tech electronics is a stark contrast to the medieval-style workshops in Africa and Asia where much of that stuff ends up after a few years.

Poor people smash the screens and burn PCBs to extract small amounts of gold and silver. What they themselves do not breathe into highly toxic and carcinogenic vapors, spouts over farmland and habitats.

 

Explosive situation

Where does all that waste come from? In Europe 'about' half of the collected electrical and electronic appliances 'disappear'. A significant part of this so - called e-waste is often illegally shipped to developing countries for cheap recycling or reuse. But researchers from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) are sounding the alarm this week with a report on the explosive increase in their own e-waste in developing countries.

The situation is particularly critical in countries such as China and India and in the continents of Africa and Latin America. A negative effect of their economic growth and large supply of cheap disposable products and a lack of regulation and supervision.

 

Seven times as many mobile phones

A few examples: in 2020 the number of mobile telephones in India will be reduced tenfold (now 1,700 tons of waste per year) and the number of computers (now 56,300 tons of waste per year) five times as large. China then suffers with seven times as many mobile phones and four times as much computer waste (now 300 thousand tons per year). Both countries can also expect a doubling of the number of old TVs (now 1.3 million tons of waste for China and 275 thousand tons for India). And that's how it goes, in all product categories and for countless poor countries, from Colombia to Kenya.

'Because of the illegality it is difficult to find exact figures, but Third World countries seem to have increasing problems because of their own electronics waste', says researcher Mariëtte van Huijstee of the Research Foundation for Multinational Enterprises  (SOMO). 'According to a study in India from 2007, the home market delivered 320 thousand tons of waste annually to mobile phones, computers and TVs. The amount of dumped electronics from abroad was estimated at 50 thousand tons. '

 

Boiling out printed circuit boards

Where is all that waste? Virtually everything comes through collectors at simple workshops, sometimes no more than poisonous dumps along rivers. There the products are disassembled in search of valuable metals, such as gold, silver, palladium and iridium and base metals such as copper, nickel and aluminum. The most precious metals are processed in electronics.

Printed circuit boards are burned or 'cooked' in the open air. For example, gold is recovered with the poisonous mercury, where gold dissolves into a gold-mercury amalgam . Cords are burned in the open air for the copper. This causes toxins to enter the air, including dioxin compounds and heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium.

 

Smoldering remains

"People hang above those smoldering electronics agents and breathe everything. Because of the smoke, the toxic substances also spread over the land, and because of all the rubbish on the ground it seeps into the groundwater ', says van Huijstee.

'How this global problem needs to be tackled is very complex. What manufacturers in Europe and the United States collect from e-waste is in principle well processed, but the majority never ends up there. Discarded electronics leak away through all sorts of channels and end up in developing countries in a legal and illegal manner. There, the products are demolished, or components are reused, 'says van Huijstee.

'Now the manufacturers in Europe must legally collect and recycle at least 4 kg per inhabitant of e-waste . But that gives an incentive to recycle especially heavy, and not smaller, devices. The European directive is now being revised, hopefully setting targets for weight in different product categories. We strive that the rules also take into account how toxic a product is. And to financially encourage the manufacturer to design environmentally friendly products. '

 

Offering more money

Together , the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) now account for 8.3 to 9.1 million tons of e-waste per year. And that increases by 3 to 5 percent per year. Almost three times as fast as the total waste stream. Worldwide, the amount of e-waste is growing by 40 million tons per year.

'There are hardly any recycling factories in developing countries. And the few that are there do not receive supplies. It is therefore important to involve the many small collectors and to offer them more money than at the local dump. Money is also needed for the construction of these modern recycling factories. All this in combination with the reduction and in the long term prohibition of all toxic substances in the production of electronics', says van Huijstee.

 

Mining wars

According to the UN report, a good approach has the potential to solve many problems. A modern recycling plant offers skilled and unskilled employment, improves living conditions, reduces environmental damage and recovers more precious metals than the primitive way. We should have proper electronic product designer who can reduce disaster made by electronics.