Christmas gifts of yesteryear meet an inglorious end at Absolute Green Electronics Recycling in Lake Forest, California. Computers are dismantled, the parts sorted into cardboard bins. One holds nothing but hard drives, another AC adapters. Bins stretch in rows across a mammoth warehouse – a bin for graphic cards, a bin for cooling fans, also cellphones, VHS camcorders, digital cameras, cables, network switches.
Stacked-up printers form a miniature mountain. Old-fashioned picture tubes sit face-down on pallets. Flat-screen monitors cluster along a wall like tombstones.
“There are different grades of boards,” said owner Victor Kianipay, stepping past hulking, dust-covered projection TVs to poke into apple boxes filled with circuit boards. Some are etched mainly in copper; others are heavily embedded with silicon chips. “Everything gets separated,” Kianipay said. “There are so many layers and layers of product.”
This is electronic waste, or e-waste – a revenue stream for Kianipay, who moved 11,250kg of discarded items in last January’s post-Christmas frenzy. E-waste also, despite the work of Kianipay and other entrepreneurial recyclers, is an environmental problem of global proportions. The ever-rising tide of electronic junk now totals nearly 50 million tonnes a year worldwide, according to the Solving The E-Waste Problem Initiative, a coalition of governments, scientists and industry groups based in Bonn, Germany.
Within five years, the annual figure may reach 65 million tonnes – enough to fill trucks parked bumper to bumper encircling three-quarters of the Earth, the coalition estimates. The waste is a particular concern in part because much of it contains lead, mercury and other hazardous substances, which are released when the waste is melted down to recover gold, silver and copper.
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Source: The Star Online
By David Ferrell