These are the various kinds of management that discarded electronics receive. There are 3 main ways that consumers dispose their e-waste, through: Dedicated Recycling Bins or E-waste Management Services, Directly into our trash bins, or selling them to the Second Hand Market. Dedicated bins or E-waste management Services remove toxic components and recover valuable materials from piles of E-waste. Treatments ensure that the urban mine is sufficiently regained while the toxic mine is sufficiently neutralized. However, the non-recyclable residuals are sent to landfills or incinerators.
However, studies have found that less that 16.6% of all E-waste was properly recycled or managed (Baldé, Wang, Kuehr, & Huisman, 2014).
One of the large reasons why E-waste is very problematic is because of the fact it is both an urban mine and a toxic mine. It is an urban mine because E-waste contains many valuable materials – iron, copper,aluminium – and precious metals – gold, silver, platinum – that can be recycled. These aforementioned materials are finite resources that are constantly mined in order to support our ever-growing demand for electronics.
However, they are also recoverable from E-waste through appropriate processing methods. If we recycled the materials from the amount of E-waste in 2014, we could obtain 300 tonnes of gold, which is 11% of the global gold production from mines. (United States Geological Survey, 2014).
E-waste discarded in 2014 was estimated to have a value of US$52 billion if the valuable materials were made available again after recycling (Maya, 2017).
It is also a toxic mine because there are many hazardous materials present. There are heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and also chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbon and various flame retardants. This threatens the health of our environment, in addition to human and non-human health.
Poor management of E-waste not only causes loss of valuable and final materials, it also causes pollution to the environment. There is continued exploitation of the environment, and also adverse effects on human health. As obsolescence and increasing affluence cause increases in the amount of E-waste, poor management simultaneously causes that increasing amount of E-waste to be a huge global hazard.