<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/03/i-spot-brand-new-tvs-here-to-be-shredded-the-truth-about-our-electronic-waste>
"In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the
nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national
park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention
the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build
these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture,
amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees
or the fakes?
I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device on which
I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are
unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers
International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US.
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate
acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic
waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year.
Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m
computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the
millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered
devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity,
tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen
drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail
and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.”
Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between 7% and 20% is
exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators in the global north, and
the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight, among the most precious
waste there is. One piece of electronic equipment can contain 60 elements, from
copper and aluminium to rarer metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in
everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for
example, contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a
tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices and the
impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the
country’s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste – including up to 7% of
the world’s gold reserves – are worth £50.9bn a year."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
