Your Share Of E-Waste
– by Srijith
When was the last time you tried to repair a broken mobile charger? I bet none of us will bother to repair it , but will try to get a new one just because of one reason- Its damn cheap! And you have added 10 gms of lead to your share of E-Waste
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To throw away , is a basic human behaviour that we’ve developed through our evolution. In the distant past everything we (Humans) used were made of plant or animal origin or non-processed natural materials like clay or rock. Thats when we developed the throw-away habit. But back then, it was not at all a problem as they will easily disintegrate to nature.Metals came to our life later and strong, long use products were developed. Production cost was higher and so people were more conscious in wisely repairing or reusing every product. But in the last few decades, we have grown in a very rapid pace and learned to make cheap alternatives to metals and clay. Plastic as we all know is the king among these. But what we are talking about is not about the ill effects of plastic. Its a known fact to every one and we have already discussed a lot about it here. I am talking about the production cost.
New technologies and innovations lowered the production costs and as a result the price came down for almost all consumer goods, especially the electronic products. You can get a calculator for 10 Rupees! In such a case, who will try to repair it once its faulty? To be frank, I wont! Its not feasible. But about 90% of any electronic product can be reused as a first grade material. In our example of calculator,
* Plastic casing can be converted epoxy pellets
* Lead and other metals ( in circuit board ) can be seperated by electrolysis and re used in manufacturing same product.
Electrolysis is ofcourse a costly process which cosumes some energy. But in large scale process, it will be much cheaper when compared to cost and energy spend in Mining and extraction.
We as an end user cannot do any such things , but what we can do is make our manufacturers do it. My inspiration to this post is an article about Nokia’s interest in recycling mobile phones. As they say in their site,
If every Nokia user recycled just one unused phone at the end of its life, together we would save nearly 80,000 tonnes
My Stepmother Is an Alien download Black Knight dvdrip of raw materials.
Think of it in a much broader sense. If every electronic manufacturer in the world starts recycling their products, we can reduce mineral/metal mining by 95%. Less wastes and less pollution. ( Mining is a heavily polluting process ) .
I came across a site which claims they will pay you for sending damaged electronic products. ( http://www.techshop.in/store/ecycle.php ) . It may be a marketing gimmick , and I am not sure how they ‘recycle’ it. It may end up as a downcycled product in a chinese factory. But if they truly recycle it, then its a perfect start. Like some one said in our initial meetings, if there is a profit, people will be interested in properly disposing waste. (techshop.in actually gives you a gift voucher worth 125 Rs which can be used in their shopping site).
Now think of this next time , before you throw away a damaged e-product.
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but everybody must realize that the biggest profit one should get from recycling or not accumulating wastes is a clean environment for them to live and a disease free healthy peaceful life. and money cant definitely bring any of these
Anybody here has a damaged headset of nokia or any phone, or any headphone that u think is unusable to give me???
people need to be more aware of the damage improperly disposing of electronic devices does to the environment. It is shocking to see the benefits we could be achieving by recycling even a little amount; if everyone contributes a little, the impact is huge!
Cool site,
Ryan