The first time I was clearly drawn to the e-waste crisis (as it was first called back then) was in January 2005, when UNEP (the United Nations Environmental Programme) published an Environmental Alert entitled “E-waste, the hidden side of IT equipment’s manufacturing and use.”
As someone working in an electronics trade-in business at the time, I was immediately drawn to their recommendations that the active re-use of old electronics would be a key weapon to tackle e-waste. This was in light of the current rudimentary recycling methods generally used at the time.
Since then the business CEX I worked for has grown to over 100 stores and has been a pioneer in the growing market of pre-owned electronics.
More recently, online companies like Gazelle and Nextworth have expanded this market onto the internet, where customers now have an even more convenient way to trade-in their unwanted gadgets and get a cash value for them too.
Soon to join will be trade2save.com, our own answer to the e-waste crisis.
Things just haven’t changed…
E-waste has taken a back seat in the media recently, but is more of a crisis than every before… a skim through the Alert Bulletin published in 2005 reveals that little has changed in terms of recycling. In 2005 modern recycling plants claimed an 80% recovery rate for recycled computers, with only 5% finishing up as waste.
The EPA (The US Environmental Protection Agency) later published a report that 10% 10 18% of electronics e-waste was being recycled 2 years later.
Here is a copy of the EPA’s report summary.
The main issue with responsible recycling on a large scale is cost. Even the most modern recycling plants still have to struggle to make the more toxic e-waste inert while still trying to run a profitable enterprise. With so much e-waste material on hand, there still remains the economic temptation for local recycling plants to profitably divert much of their e-waste material to Chine and the third world, while still maintaining a green frontage.
The only apparent change to the problem is scale.
Since the UNEP report in 2005 the business of exporting e-waste has scaled up significantly, while little or no investment has been made to police the laws which specifically prohibiting the practice.
Thankfully the rise in the trading-in and re-use of electronics has risen steadily too, and is starting to fill the hole in the nation’s current e-waste recycling strategy.
We estimate that if everyone in the USA traded in their used electronics as soon as they stopped using them regularly or upgraded, it could reduce the amount of e-waste being created by more than 50%.
The people are speaking, and Americans are starting to take matters into their own hands to make a real difference.
