Report reveals lost value of trashed tech
Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - 12:42:30
Millions of businesses and individuals around the world toss out unwanted mobile phones, computers, appliances and other electronics each year. While some of this e-waste is recycled, a lot ends up at landfill and a new study from UN University and a number of partner organisations has highlighted the cumulative cost of this trend.
Analysts estimate that gold worth the equivalent of £16.2 billion was discarded within old tech over the course of 2016. This equates to 500 tonnes of precious metal being carelessly disposed of globally, which represents around 15 per cent of the annual gold mining output.
Gold is just one of the many valuable materials which are required to make up the circuits found within smartphones and other gadgets.
Aside from being wasteful in and of itself, this is problematic because mining and processing gold from ore is much more intensive, expensive and ecologically unsound than recovering it from old electronics via recycling methods.
Furthermore, almost £740 million worth of silver, along with huge quantities of minerals, such as copper and tin, were dumped alongside the gold because of the epidemic of e-waste misuse.
With 45 million tonnes of old electronics being scrapped each year and that figure set to rise as smartphone sales increase, experts believe that it makes clear environmental and economic sense to encourage recycling.
Report spokesperson, Dr John Whitney, said that the loss of precious metals outlined in the figures was incredible and that action was being taken to expand the recycling market and make adequate resources available in as many countries as possible to change this state of affairs.
Selling an old mobile phone so that it can be refurbished and reused is especially sustainable, but even products damaged beyond repair still contain amounts of valuable materials which require recovery to avoid this issue spreading.
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