International E-Waste Day

International E-Waste Day

Subject – Environment

Context – This International E-Waste Day, give your used electronic devices for recycling, urges non-profit

Concept –

• International E-Waste Day has been observed on October 14 every year since 2018.
• The recycling will enable the recovery of “a king’s fortune in valuable materials and reduce the need for new resources”, the WEEE Forum said in a statement.
• WEEE stands for waste electronic and electrical equipment. The Brussels-based non-profit gave some shocking statistics about the rising tide of e-waste.
• This year’s WEEE will total about 57.4 million tonnes (MT). This will be greater than the weight of the Great Wall of China, Earth’s heaviest artificial object.
• Last year’s Global E-waste Monitor reported that 53.6 MT of WEEE were generated in 2019. That represented a 21 per cent jump in the five years since 2014 (with e-waste predicted to reach 74 MT by 2030).
• E-waste generation was increasing annually by 2 MT, according to the WEEE Forum statement. It attributed the rise to a higher consumption rate of electronics, shorter product lifecycles and limited repair options.
• The Environmental Protection Agency of the United States estimates that more than 151 million phones a year — approximately 416,000 a day — are trashed and end up incinerated or landfilled.
• An estimated 40 per cent of heavy metals in US landfills come from discarded electronics.
• As long as citizens don’t return their used, broken gear, sell it, or donate it, we will need to continue mining all-new materials causing great environmental damage. This year’s focus for International E-Waste Day is the crucial role each of us has in making circularity a reality for e-products.
• A tonne of discarded mobile phones is richer in gold than a tonne of gold ore.
  • Embedded in 1 million cell phones, for example, are 24 kg of gold, 16,000 kg of copper, 350 kg of silver and 14 kg of palladium — resources that could be recovered and returned to the production cycle. And if we fail to recycle these materials, new supplies need to be mined, harming the environment.
• Moreover, the recovery of gold and other material from waste saves a lot of carbon dioxide emissions when compared with virgin metal mining.
• High-value, recoverable materials conservatively valued at $57 billion — a sum greater than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries — were mostly dumped or burned in 2019 rather than being collected for treatment and reuse.

To know about Smartphones killing the planet, please click here.