When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied trash and where it ended up in 2009, one particular waste stream stood out to them: electronic waste.
“E-waste turned out to be very different in its disposal and process,” said MIT project leader Dietmar Offenhuber. “E-waste had much longer distances [to travel for disposal] than all other waste types that we looked at.”
So the researchers recently embarked on a follow-up to the original study. They found 500 volunteers in the Seattle area and tracked their e-waste from initial disposal. Participants were able to dispose of their e-waste in any fashion they sought fit.
However, the tracking devices implanted onto the e-waste had limited-battery life and the signal was relayed back to Boston from a cell phone, so items that left the country were unable to be tracked much farther than the United States border.
“We had quite a number of objects end up in ports and we could also follow them a little way into the Pacific Ocean,” Offenhuber said. “We also had quite a number that went down into Mexico.”
He said with such a small sample size, itґs hard to draw any concrete conclusion about the percentage of e-waste that was processed domestically and how much went out of the country. But, he said, much of the e-waste taken from Seattle did not stay in the area.
“It was interesting to see the facilities and destinations and make inferences on where they ended up,” Offenhuber said. “We had a number of objects, like batteries and cell phones, end up in Florida, Atlanta and other places in the East.”
He said device locations often pointed to specialized recycling facilities.
“With these objects, we were confident they were being processed (properly), but once they were processed, the trackers were destroyed so we couldnґt follow them further.”
The project raised important questions, including whether carbon dioxide emissions from transporting batteries across the country outweigh the benefits of recycling e-waste, said Assaf Biderman, the labґs associate director.
“The large volumes of electronic refuse generated annually present both a toxic liability and a potentially valuable resource,” he said.
The group of researchers, part of the MIT Senseable City Lab, will do another e-waste study with trackers that will be able to give results beyond the U.S. border, Offenhuber said, which will start in the fall and run until the end of the year.
“This is really the interesting part – to show the global network of recycling and reuse,” he said.
The sample size will be similar because of financial limitations, he said. The project was completed in conjunction with Qualcomm and LG Electronics.
A second portion of the research included sending laptops and computers with internal tracking devices and web cameras to be reused in other portions of the world. The researchers worked closely with the people who received the electronics so they knew what would be happening.
The computers were programmed to detect its location, capture images automatically, and send that information back to MIT as soon as an Internet connection was made.
“In that portion, it wasnґt about where these computers might end up, but look at the circumstances in which they were being used,” Offenhuber said.
The computers ended up all over the world, including in India and parts of Africa. Some were used by individuals and some were used in classrooms.
“In order to get the information back from these computers, they need to be connected to the Internet,” Offenhuber said. “And to have a computer reporting from a rural part of African, in Ghana, in Kenya а it was surprising to see them get wireless connections in those places.”
Pictures from the various the web cams are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. For more information on the project, visit MITґs website for the lab.
Source: Waste & Recycling News
By Jeremy Carroll