Where does your e-waste go?
I’m the last person to use the letter ‘e’ in front of normal words to describe things in the internet-enabled world, so I apologize for the title 
Anyway, in the spirit of a previous post about re-using, today I just wanted to bring folk’s attention to the problem of getting rid of ‘e-waste’ like televisions, computer monitors, computer parts, printers and other things.
With Christmas coming, and all sorts of electronic toys, gizmos, consoles and other things on the wishlist of many people, getting rid of our old things that are broken or simply unwanted is a growing problem. Naturally, like most waste, most of the old electronics that people don’t want any more ends up in landfills, which is bad enough, but even the electronics and computers that are collected in recycling drives ends up in third-world countries where there aren’t any laws or rules regarding the recycling of circuit boards, cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) and other things like that.
According to the CNN article:
“While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.”
So it’s not a great thing to just blindly recycle things, because the charity taking care of it may not have researched where exactly the items will go, or check up on if they were properly taken care of.
I have enough trouble finding a place in the UK that will recycle my old batteries that I don’t bother trying to recycle my computer bits - I put things like that on Freecycle to get them to people who will actually use them. There are plenty of geeks out there that would love to have an extra computer case, old motherboard, anything, that there’s almost no excuse for just throwing things away these days (and not just computer bits).
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