{"id":3838,"date":"2023-06-27T12:41:18","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T09:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/foresteconomics\/?p=3838"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:41:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T09:41:18","slug":"the-truth-about-electronic-waste-the-dust-has-to-be-disposed-off-as-hazardous-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cfwt.sua.ac.tz\/foresteconomics\/the-truth-about-electronic-waste-the-dust-has-to-be-disposed-off-as-hazardous-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"The truth about electronic waste: The dust has to be disposed off as hazardous waste"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span><\/span>n the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can\u2019t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?<\/span><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t come to Fresno to see the trees; I\u2019ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US.<\/p>\n

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that\u2019s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept \u201cjust in case\u201d. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: \u201cOur biggest competitor is apathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between\u00a07% and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators<\/a>\u00a0in the global north, and the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight, among the most precious waste there is. One piece of electronic equipment can contain 60 elements, from copper and aluminium to rarer metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for example, contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country\u2019s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste \u2013 including up to 7% of the world\u2019s gold reserves \u2013 are worth \u00a350.9bn a year.<\/p>\n

Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief operating officer of ERI, arrives wearing the corporate uniform of a tech executive: navy hoodie and jeans. \u201cYou\u2019ll need these,\u201d he says, handing me a pair of bright orange earplugs. Blum and a friend started ERI back in 2002, after leaving college. California had just banned electronics from landfills due to hazardous chemical contents \u2013 but little recycling infrastructure existed. \u201cI didn\u2019t know anything about electronics. I was a business major,\u201d Blum says. Today, ERI has eight facilities across the US and processes 57,000 tonnes of scrap electronics a year.<\/p>\n

To get to the factory floor, we pass through a scanner. Security is tight for a reason: millions of dollars\u2019 worth of still-functioning or repairable electronics passing through make it a tempting target for thieves. In the loading bay, a goateed guy named Julio is unloading pallets of shrink-wrapped monitors from a Salvation Army truck \u2013 charity shops are a major source of ERI\u2019s product. Everything that arrives is scanned before being dismantled and sorted. \u201cYou can\u2019t shred certain materials, so you\u2019ve got to do a sort,\u201d Blum says.<\/p>\n

Electronics are piled everywhere: flatscreens, DVD players, desktops, printers, keyboards. At a set of tables, nine men are taking apart large TVs, their electric screwdrivers emitting a low whiz. Another is smashing a monitor from its casing with a hammer (\u201cDue to the adhesive\u201d). The dismantling crews, Blum says, will handle up to 2,948kg (6,500lb) of devices a day.<\/p>\n

We pass a noticeboard marked Focus Material, on which actual parts have been pinned as visual aids: motherboards, wire scraps, monitor casings. \u201cThis hits home more than reading a document,\u201d Blum says.<\/p>\n

Scrap recycling contains so many different materials that the industry has developed its own shorthand: light copper is \u201cDream\u201d, No 1 copper wire is \u201cBarley\u201d, insulated aluminium wire is \u201cTwang\u201d. There\u2019s no such poetry here, however. Instead, the extracted pieces are thrown into boxes scrawled with things like Copper and CAT-5 wiring. Inside one I notice a coil of LED Christmas lights. \u201cDuring the holidays we get a ton of these. This is all copper, in the wire,\u201d Blum says, grabbing a handful. \u201cWe have to go through and manually cut the bulbs off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would rather have their old machines wiped and shredded<\/p>\n

Some materials \u2013 paper, batteries \u2013 must be removed for safety reasons. \u201cIf something gets through that can\u2019t be shredded, you can have a fire or an explosion,\u201d Blum says. \u201cWhen you\u2019re shredding metal, it gets really hot.\u201d Heat-sensing cameras constantly scan the factory floor for hot pockets, and the workers wear masks and gloves: e-waste contains toxicants ranging from lead and mercury to polybrominated flame-retardants and PFAS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The centrepiece of the facility is the shredder, a hulking beast that stretches the length of the building, three storeys high, making a prodigious racket. (Hence the earplugs.) Once the waste has been sorted, a worker in a Bobcat telehandler carries it over to the conveyor\u2019s gaping maw, where ultra-hardened spinning blades cut through aluminium and plastic like ice in a blender. \u201cWhen you\u2019re shredding electronics, you\u2019re creating dust that contains lead from the circuit boards, so we have collection hoods sucking up all the dust,\u201d Blum hollers. The dust has to be disposed of as hazardous waste. I nod, exhilarated by the sheer violence of it.<\/p>\n

Magnetic belts, air-sorters and filters separate the materials as they pass along the shredder, dropping them into giant \u201csuper sacks\u201d. We stop at one and look down at a treasure haul of silver-grey flecks. \u201cWe call this precious metal fines,\u201d Blum says. \u201cIt\u2019s gold, silver and palladium from the circuit boards.\u201d A single sack\u2019s contents are probably worth enough to buy a decent car.<\/p>\n

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\n
\"Piles<\/div>
Piles of shredded copper at the facility \u2026<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"Sacks<\/div>\n
\u2026 and sacks of precious metals, aluminium, steel, plastic and copper. Photographs: Philip Cheung\/The Guardian<\/div>
Farther along the line, the conveyor splits off into tributaries. A robot arm whirrs above one, picking up parts. \u201cWe used to have 15 pickers on this line. Now we have two or three,\u201d Blum says. The company spent a lot of money training the robot, which picks far faster than any human could and is now 97% accurate. Blum seems to prefer it to people. \u201cIt comes to work every day and never got Covid,\u201d he says. I can\u2019t tell if he\u2019s joking.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Near the end of the line, more metals roll into their super sacks. ERI\u2019s biggest material streams, by weight, are steel, plastic, aluminium and brass. The circuit boards are sent to LS Nikko, a metals manufacturing giant based in South Korea; the aluminium goes to the US smelting giant Alcoa. \u201cThe steel might go to your large steel buyers in the US \u2013 they might send it to mills in Turkey, but otherwise, everything stays domestic.\u201d<\/p>\n

ERI charges customers a fee for disposal, dismantling, data removal and recycling. Most are motivated not by reducing waste, Blum says, but by cybersecurity: \u201cNinety-nine per cent of the electronics you have today have your data on them. So data has become very, very important.\u201d Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would rather have their old machines wiped and shredded. \u201cWe have Homeland Security come to our facilities. They will escort the material to the shredder, stand watching while we run the material through, and sometimes even take the shred out.\u201d<\/p>\n