Finding the 'gold' in escrap! A man lifts a used computer monitor at a recycling company in Bordeaux, France . Activists claim that even in developed countries recycling and disposal of e-waste may involve significant risk to workers and communities and great care must be taken to avoid unsafe exposure in recycling operations and leaching of material such as heavy metals from landfills and incinerator ashes.
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Finding the 'gold' in escrap!
A man lifts a used computer monitor at a recycling company in Bordeaux, France .
Activists claim that even in developed countries recycling and disposal of e-waste may involve significant risk to workers and communities and great care must be taken to avoid unsafe exposure in recycling operations and leaching
of material such as heavy metals from landfills and incinerator ashes.
• Discarded printer cartidges lie in the road at Yaocuowei village near Guiyu in China's southern Guangdong province.
• For years now, electronic waste from richer economics have found their way into China, where armies of its rural poor are rummaging through central processing units (CPU), printers, mainframes, keyboards, monitors and just about any electronic device to savage what they can sell to recyclers.
• Workers place obsolete computers at a recycling plant in Buenos Aires.• Critics of trade in used electronics maintain that it is too easy for brokers
calling themselves recyclers to export unscreened electronic waste to developing countries, such as China, India and parts of Africa, thus avoiding the expense of removing items like bad cathode ray tubes (the processing of which is expensive and difficult).
• Computer waste is piled up inside a ramshackle hut next to a calender featuring late Chinese leader Mao Zedong at Yaocuowei village in China's southern Guangdong province.
• Developing countries are becoming big dump yards of e-waste due to their weak laws. Despite the international Basel Convention which in 1994 banned export of all hazardous wastes from rich to poor countries for any reason, including recycling, electronic trash from the United States, and to a lesser extent, Europe, South Korea and Japan have ended up on Chinese shores.
• A technician walks inside an e-waste recycle factory at Mankhal, 55 km south of Hyderabad.
• But developing nations like China and India face their own increasing pile if e-waste trash. in 2007, a local environment group estimated that India produces 150,000 tonnes of electronic waste each year.
• Obsolete computer monitors are piled up at a recycling plant in Buenos Aires.• In many such developing nations, especially India, informal recycling system
includes acceptable processes such as dismantling and sorting but also very harmful processes such as burning and leaching in order to extract metals from electronic equipment
• Greenpeace activists set up an art installation made of dismantled computers to send a message on hazardous electronic waste during a protest in front of the office of Ministry of IT in New Delhi.
• In India, e-waste is mostly generated in metros like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The e-waste business is mainly operated by a very entrepreneurial informal sector of rag pickers and waste dealers (Kabadiwalals).
• Computers monitors and others obsolete electronic devices are piled up at a recycling plant in Buenos Aires.
• Repair and reuse of electronic goods has become a "lost art" in wealthier nations. However, countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and southern China have all excelled in finding "retained value" in used goods, and in some cases have set up billion-dollar industries in refurbishing used ink cartridges, single-use cameras, and working CRTs.
• A worker looks through industrial scrap materials at Dowa Holdings Co's Eco-System Recycling Co, a recycling plant, in Honjo, north of Tokyo.
• In many cases ewaste is broken down to extract gold, silver, copper and a host of other metals embedded in the electronics -- many of which are enjoying near-record prices.
• A worker scoops industrial scrap materials, collected from discarded electronic items, at a recycling plant, in Honjo, north of Tokyo.
• This process of "urban mining" or scavenging through the scrap metal in old electronic products in search of such gems as iridium and gold, is a growth industry around the world as metal prices skyrocket.
• A worker pours molten gold, recycled from components of mobile phones and other discarded electronic items, into a mould at a recycling plant in Japan.
• Audiovisual components, televisions, VCRs, stereo equipment, mobile phones, other handheld devices, and computer components contain valuable elements and substances suitable for reclamation, including lead, coppe and gold.
• A worker hammers an obsolete printer at a recycling plant in Buenos Aires.• Today the electronic waste recycling business is in all areas of the
developed world a large and rapidly consolidating business. • Source: India Syndicate
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