Recycling: What goes out, comes back in

Buy a phone. Chuck a phone.

Where does your old phone go? Into your “forgot-me” drawer? Down the rubbish chute with peeled bananas or soggy leftovers?

Regardless your old phone is now trash. It’s the same for the cranky laptops, buzzy mp3 players, and defunct electronics that were thrown out over the months.

That is a problem, and it has a name: E-waste.

What’s E-waste?

Short for “Electronic Waste”, it’s defined as:

…all secondary computers, entertainment device electronics, mobile phones, and other items such as television sets and refrigerators, whether sold, donated, or discarded by their original owners. This definition includes used electronics which are destined for reuse, resale, salvage, recycling, or disposal.

Src: Wikipedia

So it’s rubbish; and like other rubbish, it gets worse when it piles up. Discarded electronics create pollution via heavy metals that leech into the ground, and they’re being discarded faster than other types of rubbish.

Francis Cheong, Regional Environmental Manager for Nokia Asia-Pacific, says, “The explosion of electronic products has been increasing at a fantastic rate. At the end of the day, all of the landfills will be used up.”

Dealing with E-waste

That means we’ll be living in a rubbish heap, like this little Russian girl.

Ughh.

That’s why Nokia’s advocating a take-back and recycle program for any phone. Although a phone can’t save the world on its own, taken together recycling many phones could make the difference.

Francis says, “If 1.3 billion phones are recycled, that is equal to saving 800,000 tons of raw material that’s being mined from the Earth. And that is the same as reducing carbon emissions from 1.3 million cars. A spoilt battery on its own might not make a big difference, but in all, if everyone recycles just one battery, it makes a huge difference.”

Urbanites think recycling means: put waste paper in the green bin, plastics in the yellow bin, and everything else in the blue bin.

That’s just a part of it.

But what does really mean to recycle E-waste?

Onto The Guts Of Recycling: Behind the scenes

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