Hello and Welcome!!
This is what I heard with each and every webinar over the past four weeks while I was doing an online marketing course. I did it at the Shaw Academy and I really can recommend them if you want to do some online courses. They phone you straight out of the UK and help you with every step of the way at your own pace.
But this is way off topic.
So; My question is: When you upgrade your computer, fridge, toaster, microwave or mobile phone, what do you do you do with your used appliances? Well most of us sell it or give it to a family or friend. Well what do they do with their old parts? Well according to a 2015 report of the United Nations University (UNU) we dump our “e-waist” at a rate of two million tons per year. Estimating the total waist to reach an astonishing 50 megatons by 2018 if we continue this pattern.
The fast-growing mountain of waste also contains alarming quantities of toxins, including 4,400 tons of ozone-depleting chemicals and 2.2 megatons of lead glass weighing more than the equivalent of the Empire State Building. If all this waist from all the countries was gathered it would generate enough waste to fill 1.2 million 40-ton lorries each year. A queue of such lorries would stretch from New York to Tokyo and back again. Best of all, is that most of this waste is either in working condition or require minor repair work.
The cause of all this is based on new technology being released and everybody wanting the new parts, and secondly due to mass manufacture and inflation, components is created cheaper, therefore they have a shorter lifespan. It is this shortened lifespan that also contributes to this massive problem.
The UNU research found that rather than being dominated by discarded electronics such as mobile phones or computers, the majority (nearly 60 per cent) of e-waste consisted of large and small domestic appliances or office equipment. It included 12.8 megatons of smaller items such as microwaves or toasters and 18.8 megatons of “white goods” such as fridges, washing machines, dryers and other large appliances.
Among the resources being lost annually, as millions of items from mobile phones to fridges are inadequately disposed of, are 300 tons of gold worth £7bn (equivalent to more than a 10th of global production in 2013) as well as 1,000 tons of silver worth £400m and 16 megatons of steel with a value of £6.5bn. All of these valuable resources that is much needed in most developing countries, but at the same time, the hazardous content of e-waste constitutes a ‘toxic mine’ that must be managed with extreme care.
Then again this is a major opportunity for creating jobs and starting to collect these materials and sell them to be recycled. These recycled materials are then used and obviously sold at a lower cost to company. The amount that was actually recycled is estimated to be less than one sixth of all the e-waste.
Britain is identified as among the world’s most profligate producers of e-waste, ranking fifth in the weight of material discarded per inhabitant, with each Briton generating 23.5kg each year. The UK was also sixth worldwide in the total amount of e-waste the country generated, with some 1.5 megatons – barely 100,000 tons less than India which has 20 times the population.
Experts said Britain, in common with other European Union countries, was missing an opportunity to ensure that its inhabitants’ appetite for consumer durable results in a thriving recycling industry. The UNU report said that only one-third of e-waste in the UK is recycled through recognized schemes – a figure that must reach 85 per cent under EU rules by 2019. Federico Magalini, a UNU researcher, said: “In the UK we are seeing that the ‘lifespan’ of an electric or electronic product may be particularly short.
This creates massive responsibilities to waist management companies that is responsible for dealing with these issues.The Environment Agency estimates that some 11,500 shipping containers are illegally exported from the UK each year containing either household or electrical waste – the equivalent of 200,000 tons of material a year.
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