The WEEE Forum began worldwide E-Waste Day in 2018 to support consumers to recycle and reuse electronics responsibly.
E-waste is one of the fastest-growing trash streams on the earth. According to the BIR (Bureau of International Recycling) research, worldwide created e-waste will strike some 53.9 million tonnes by 2025. It is a growth rate of 30% since 2016.
Only 20% of worldwide e-waste is presently adequately recycled every year. The rest is either burned, thrown away, or recycled informally, building safety and health hazards and negatively affecting the atmosphere.
Table of Contents
What is e-waste?
E-waste is all end-of-life stocks with an energy cord or a battery. It has a broad array of products such as electrical toys, small kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners, power tools, laptops, computers, electric toothbrushes, printers, routers, servers, switches, etc.
In Europe, e-waste is also called WEEE, which means Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment.
You can recycle nearly all e-waste, a method that is segregated, recovered, and reused as secondary raw elements to create new devices and products.
For various electrical devices, it is possible to increase the product’s life cycle by fixing it. Particularly for professional IT devices, reuse of the thing or elements is a genuine choice.
Reuse increases the life cycle, which decreases the need for new goods and components. It drives a positive effect on the atmosphere because of the decrease of CO2 emissions and the reduced demand for mining raw elements through production.
Why is effective recycling of e-waste necessary?
Electrical products are created utilizing various materials such as metals (e.g., aluminum, copper, iron, silver, gold, mercury, and palladium), plastics (e.g., ABS, PP, PE), glass, and various chemical compounds.
Also, lithium-ion batteries are frequently a considerable part of mobile devices carrying harmful gasses and are a flammability danger.
Some plastics include older kinds of flame-retardants that are dangerous and should be handled carefully and controlled. The same is relevant for mercury, which can be seen in the backlights of LCDs.
Good and documented recycling companies take essential health and protection precautions to preserve their workers and the atmosphere. These companies are routinely inspected and approved by third-party accreditations such as R2 and CENELEC / WEEELABEX.
These measures are frequently not performed in the informal recycling sector, resulting in diseases and injuries to workers and chemicals or hefty metals contaminating the atmosphere.
What can you do for International E-Waste Day?
Consumers and businesses are usually not aware that several things are repairable and, hence, reusable. All products must be adequately recycled, recovering as much stuff as possible when you can no longer efficiently increase the life cycles.
You can:
- Verify if a discarded object is still repairable,
- When fixable, verify if its power consumption is high compared to fresh products. If it is high, it may be good to recycle and replace it appropriately.
- Ensure you collect all old objects with a battery or power cord individually and discard them in an e-waste case.
Take-back mechanisms are available in various countries run by a familiar producers’ organization or your regional government.
For Eenterprises and Businesses
The market study has revealed that many companies are not aware of what results to their retired devices. It may frequently be managed by a trash collector or the latest equipment supplier, but what occurs after that remains unclear.
It is essential to know how to preserve your brand and data and reduce your old equipment’s chance of finishing up in a landfill.
For discarded service IT facilities and data centers, it is essential to:
- Verify that your data is adequately eradicated.
- Confirm if your material has reuse potential in various markets or environment
- Be knowledgeable of what happens to your removed electronics; assure effective recycling.
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