Experts urge global standards for electronics reuse, recycling
Sep 29th, 2009 | By admin | Category: Featured Articles, In Focus
In 2006, more than 1 billion cell phones, 230 million computers, and 45 million TVs were sold worldwide. What will be the fate of these complex electronic products when they are eventually replaced or discarded?
The sad fact is that much of the world’s electronic scrap ends up in developing countries, where it typically is incinerated to recover the component metals. Not only is this a waste of still-functional devices, but it pollutes the local (and global) environment with dangerous heavy metals and toxic dioxins, furans and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
To counter this trend, experts behind the world’s first international e-waste academy have called for standardized global policies governing the reuse and recycling of electronic products. Only in this way, they caution, can we stem and ultimately reverse the growing problem of illegal and harmful e-waste processing practices in developing countries, and thereby achieve a more complete end-of-life harvesting of the highly valuable metals and other components they contain.
Making appropriate recycling technologies available worldwide, and standardizing government policy approaches to reuse and recycling, also could dramatically extend the life of many electronic products.
“It’s vitally important to get unwanted devices into re-use before they get too old and damaged to be re-conditioned,” says Dr. Ramzy Kahmat of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, Arizona State University. This could be achieved, he suggests, by utilizing a return-deposit to discourage consumers from simply storing their old equipment in a drawer, garage or basement.
E-Waste Summer School
From 6-11 September, Dr. Kahmat and other international participant shared and compared ideas on e-waste management in the first E-Waste Summer School, organized by NVMP (the Dutch Foundation for the Disposal of Metal and Electrical Products) and the Solving the E-Waste Problem (StEP) initiative (a UNU-coordinated global public-private initiative based in Bonn, Germany).
Participants from 15 countries attended the school, hosted at the Philips High-Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Netherlands. There, they explored topics ranging from policy, technology and economics to the social challenges of reducing e-waste in the first-ever academy to examine the e-waste issue in its entirety rather than through the lens of a specific academic discipline.
Their conclusions were presented on 15 September at the R’09 Twin World Congress in Davos, Switzerland.
Longer life, better materials recovery
Although the effort will not be easy, “rapid product innovations and replacements – the shift from analog to newer digital technologies, and to flat-screen TVs and monitors, for example – is pushing every country to find more effective ways to cope with their e-waste,” says UNU’s Ruediger Kuehr, Executive Secretary of StEP.
It is estimated that millions of no-longer-wanted electronic devices in North America and Europe could easily double their typical three- or four-year “first life” by being put to use in classrooms and small offices across Africa, South America and Asia.
And it can be done. An exhaustive study by Dr. Kahmat in 2008 found that more than 85% of used computers imported by Peru were put back into service. This contrasts sharply, however, with countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan and Ghana where roughly 80% of imported devices classified as reusable are nevertheless scrapped.
Even when they are no longer usable, electronic devices contain valuable materials that can be recovered if the devices are properly dismantled and recycled. According to StEP estimates, a ton of used mobile phones (some 6,000 handsets), for example, contains about 130 kilograms of copper 3.5 kilograms of silver, 340 grams of gold, and 140 grams of palladium. Recovering these metals with state-of-the art recycling processes would generate only a small fraction of the CO2 and other hazardous emissions that mining them would cause, as well as limit land degradation.
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