Why is e waste valuable

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Discover Chemistry Explore the interesting world of science with articles, videos and more. Toxic residues can leak and contaminate the soil, air and water, affecting surrounding ecosystems where the local communities grow their food, hunt and fish.

The hazardous substances are also spread to other continents through the air and the sea. Apart from being a risk to human health and the environment, the current way of handling e-waste has a negative economic impact.

Electronic products contain a number of scarce, valuable resources, that are also essential for meeting our future product needs. In , it was estimated that electronic waste contained gold, silver, copper, platinum, palladium and other recoverable materials to a value of 55 billion Euros. In the circular economy , products are designed for reuse over a longer period and waste is avoided. When a product has reached the end of its usable life, materials turns to valuable resources, used to manufacture new products.

The goal is that no waste is produced. Instead, materials are kept in use and are reshaped over time. For the IT industry, this means designing products that are durable, upgradeable, repairable and reusable. It should be possible to take them apart and vital components must be replaceable. Instructions for how to repair the product should be made available. It must be possible to delete data securely, so the product can be reused by a second owner without risk of data leakage.

Also, the use of hazardous substances must be reduced or eliminated. Otherwise it may be difficult or impossible to recycle the materials when the product has reached the end of its usable life.

Use your products for as long as possible. Potentially functional units are first stripped of data and then sent off for refurbishment and resale, which is more cost-effective than recycling it simply to extract raw materials.

Any remaining, non-functional devices are sent on for further processing. These non-functional units then go through another sorting process to determine the best method s for obtaining the highest financial return from that device.

Depending on the internal components, it often makes the most sense to manually disassemble the unit and extract various pieces individually due to their higher relative value. Some, like computer motherboards and graphics cards, can be sold as-is to be integrated into another computer. The remaining parts, including cases, power supplies, wiring harnesses, and circuit boards, may be disassembled and the parts sorted further to fully optimize the per-pound return on investment.

After all of that is complete, the pallets, barrels, and boxes containing the various sorted components are sent off to be processed. Some, like graphics cards, may be reused without further processing, while others will go through more mechanical and chemical processes to recover specific materials.

The recycling journey from start to finish for obsolete electronics requires a considerable amount of transportation, material handling, and skilled labor, in addition to vehicles, facilities, and industrial equipment.

While the benefits of the entire process far outweigh the downside, the cost of each of these business elements slowly erodes the value of the raw materials contained within each device until only a small profit can be made, even at larger scales. The United Nations calls it a tsunami of e-waste. While more electronic devices are part of the problem, they also can be a big part of the solution. A more digital and connected world will help us accelerate progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals SDGs , offering unprecedented opportunities for emerging economies.

Get it right and we will see a lot less of our precious minerals, metals and resources dumped into landfill. The benefit to industry and workers as well as the health of people and the environment could be enormous. It is crucial we swiftly employ a more circular vision in this sector.

These agencies, along with the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have released a joint report which calls for a new circular vision for the sector.

The economic arguments are strong. More than countries have an annual GDP lower than the value of our growing pile of global e-waste.

It makes sense too - there is times more gold in a tonne of mobile phones than in a tonne of gold ore. Extending the life of electronic products and re-using electrical components brings an even larger economic benefit, as working devices are certainly worth more than the materials they contain.

A circular electronics system - one in which resources are not extracted, used and wasted, but re-used in countless ways - creates decent, sustainable jobs and retains more value in the industry. If ocean plastic pollution was one of the major environmental challenges we finally woke up to in , the ebb and flow of public opinion could and should turn to electronic waste in