There’s gold in them thar’ hills – except not nearly as much as in all the computers, cell phones, and sundry electronic equipment we make and then discard each year. Indeed, according to the organizers of the first e-Waste Academy, held recently in Accra, Ghana, electronic goods contain 40 to 50 times the amount of gold and precious metals than ores mined from the ground. The difference is that, right now, we’re digging one up and burying or discarding the other. Even as the cost of gold quadrupled over the past decade, most countries – developed or developing – have been slow to see the payoff in urban mining.
How much might this El(ectronic)-Dorado be worth? Getting robust data on the amount of precious metal used to manufacture electronics was the first challenge, says Ruediger Kuehr – a political scientist who began to think about the issues involved in technology transfer and environmental policy over a decade ago, and who – as a result – cofounded the “Solving the E-Waste Problem” (StEP) initiative, a partnership between the United Nations and academic and business organizations. It found that the annual production of electronic goods worldwide required 320 tons of gold and over 7,500 tons of silver, with a combined value of $21 billion dollars. At present, just 15 percent of that is recovered.
Kuehr and his colleagues saw a problem that needed solving, not least because worldwide demand for electronic goods is rapidly increasing. Tablet computers, for instance, are expected to sell 100 million units this year – and double that in 2014. And with growing innovation, and ever-shortening product cycles, comes an enormous amount of sophisticated waste. But rather than fret about the scale of the environmental problem, and demand government do something or industry stop doing something, the initiative believed that the free market and government needed to collaborate to make urban mining environmentally sustainable and economically profitable. “We wanted both perspectives working together in order to balance their different agendas and interests,” said Federico Magalini, a professor of engineering and project manager for the e-Waste Academy.
Source: Forbes
By Trevor Butterworth