E-waste rising dangerously in Asia: UN study

[WhiteTara]

Source: AFP

Electronic waste is rising sharply across Asia as higher incomes allow hundreds of millions of people to buy smartphones and other gadgets, with serious consequences for human health and the environment, according to a UN study released Sunday.

So-called e-waste in Asia has jumped 63 percent in five years, the report by the United Nations University said, as it warned of a need for most nations across the region to improve recycling and disposal methods.

"For many countries that already lack infrastructure for environmentally sound e-waste management, the increasing volumes are a cause for concern," said Ruediger Kuehr, the report's co-author and head of the UN University's Sustainable Cycles Programme.

For many years, China and some other parts of Asia have been a dumping ground for discarded electronics from the developed world, recycling the waste in often unsafe but ultracheap backyard factories.

But the report said that in recent years, Asia has rapidly emerged as a major source of electronic waste, due to increasingly affluent consumers buying items such as phones, tablets, refrigerators, personal computers and televisions.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/e-waste-rising-dangerously-asia-un-study-094428893.html

[silverweb]

1. I've always wondered about this.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Apparently, there are a number of rare minerals in cell phones, tablets, etc. If these can be isolated by whatever process from raw earth, why can't they be reclaimed from discarded electronics?

Wouldn't that be more sensible than searching for and mining new sources of these minerals?

[canetoad]

2. Apparently it's not as easy as that

..snip...
Cell phones are typically recycled by smashing, shredding and grinding them into powder. The powder can then be separated into component materials for disposal or recycling. But new cell phones incorporate more elements than ever — some around 65 in total. (For comparison, all of industry uses only about 85 different elements.) This makes the powder a more complicated mixture to separate than it was with older phones. “It’s easier to separate rare earth elements from rocks than from cell phones,” King says.

To separate these materials often means “very aggressive solvents or very high temperature molten metal processing. It’s not simple,” says Yale University industrial ecologist Thomas Graedel.

Because of the nasty materials or large amounts of energy needed, in some cases recycling could create greater environmental harm than mining for the metals in the first place. “A case by case analysis is needed to decide whether a given product is a good recycling candidate,” Graedel says.

https://ensia.com/features/why-rare-earth-recycling-is-rare-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

[WhiteTara]

3. Thanks for that clarification