Artists Places Emphasis on E-Waste Issues with New Work
Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - 11:09:16
Western countries like the UK rely on other regions of the world to take on a lot of the unwanted old electronics that are no longer needed by consumers and businesses. This means that through exporting, much of the scale of the e-waste problem is hidden from view.
To this end, an artist known as Shen Bolun created a new piece using old mobile phones and other discarded gadgets to raise awareness about the sheer volume of outdated technology that is still being discarded today.
Comparing it to the biblical Tower of Babel, Bolun said that this sculpture should serve to inspire people to think more carefully about their habits and ideally improve the rates of recycling.
Since consumers in the UK can sell their old mobile phones to recycling operators, it is simple to circumvent a lot of the complications involved in handset ownership that are being singled out by this work.
However, plenty of consumers either choose to hold onto their old phones for no good reason, leaving the precious minerals they contain out of reach, or simply toss them in with the general waste, meaning that they will sit in landfill sites for centuries to come.
The artwork takes a prominent position at a shopping centre in the Chinese capital of Beijing, sitting at the heart of a country that has its own e-waste challenges to overcome. Each year it generates over 15 million tonnes of unwanted electronics, which is a figure that continues to rise annually.
Campaigners at Greenpeace helped to fund and organise this installation, and it is clear that there is an international need to raise awareness about the opportunities that are available to recycle old phones and electronics rather than seeing them go to waste.
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