Gadget mountain rising in Asia threatens health, environment Developed Western nations may be patting themselves on their backs about how well their recycling programmes are going, transitioning coal power stations top renewable energy, but often the problem has just been moved elsewhere. All over the world, due to obsolescence, we are replacing gadgets at an ever increasing rate. The problem is they are often not being recycled, and many contain rare elements which are being depleted instead of recycled. Making matters worse is the illegal global trade in waste (moving from countries with strict laws to other countries where they are just dumped). In some cases this waste is being recycled, by poor people at great health risk to themselves, and where the burning of plastics etc is also causing dangerous air pollution. Some products, like Apple, are not even manufactured so that they can be easily recycled. Manufacturers need to start taking more accountability and instead of just producing goods at an ever increasing rate, they need to be finding ways to better re-use materials from these discarded products. From the article: Ruediger Kuehr, one of the study's authors, said the amount of waste being generated is higher than governments estimate, partly because of their narrower definitions, and should be a wake-up call to policymakers and consumers. "We are all benefiting from the luxury of these electrical and electronic products to a certain extent, it makes our lives easier, sometimes more complicated," he said. "However if we want to continue like this we must be reusing the resources contained in electronic and electrical equipment." A smartphone, for example, uses more than half the elements in the periodic table, some of which are very rare, and in the longer-run will be exhausted without recycling, said Kuehr. See http://ift.tt/2jduUEe
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