We don’t often think about the final resting place of our favorite devices. But much of the electronics we throw away–computers, phones, televisions–gets illegally dumped in poverty-stricken countries like Ghana and Nigeria, which lack the infrastructure to recycle the parts efficiently. Instead, they are stripped down by hand, and some pieces are haphazardly set ablaze to extract the valuable metals within, exposing workers to harmful toxins.
Hal Watts, a designer and recent graduate of the Imperial College in London, has devised an easier, safer way to recycle copper wiring, one of the most common forms of e-waste. His device, called Esource–which started out as his final project at Imperial–includes two components: a bicycle-powered shredder that pulverizes the copper and its plastic coating into fine particles, and a sorter, which separates the copper from the plastic. The process is not only nonhazardous but also results in a 2% greater yield of pure copper.
“A lot of these people depend on burning cables as their primary income, but it’s the most health-damaging [e-waste] issue,” says Watts, who was recently nominated for design of the year by the Design Museum in London. In 2011, after becoming interested in electronic waste, he spent a week at an e-waste dump in Accra, Ghana, where he observed the burning process firsthand and talked to the copper exporters. (Ironically, most of the copper is sent back to Europe, which, according to the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency, illegally exports up to 75%, or 8 million tons, of its e-waste.)
Source: Fast Co. Design