not too long ago you probably weren't thinking all that much about electronics
disposal but nowadays there's a veritable glut of inexpensive portable
Electronics available around the globe in fact they're so common that some
countries are starting to treat internet access as a human right and like
anything else our Electronics wear out over time or at the very least become
embarrassing when something better comes along which can take a surprisingly
short amount of time I mean think about how often smartphones get updated so
what happens to all this stuff when we're done using it does it all go to
some retro Tech Museum in the sky when
we throw it away unfortunately no much
of it simply gets buried in landfills when people throw out their old modems
or whatever else along with banana peels and that clown toy that Sally never
wanted to play with for some reason but as you might guess most electronic waste
or e waste isn't biodegradable and even
contains toxic metals like Mercury and
cadmium as well as other not so good chemicals that can leech through
landfills and end up in groundwater not
a great situation I mean even if you don't think of yourself as a tree hugger
you're probably not a big fan of mercury flavored coffee so lots of folks then
opt to recycle their E-Waste instead of
just tossing it in the trash but how exactly does Electronics Rec cycling
work well sorry to bust your happy
carbon neutral bubble but the Inconvenient Truth is that it often
doesn't although there are lots of places that advertise electronic waste
disposal much of it doesn't actually end up disposed of properly at all instead
much of it is shipped off to poor countries for Reclamation where things
like circuit boards are literally set on
fire or dunked into acid so the workers
can go dig through it afterwards and recover useful materials such as copper
and gold so as you might be able to guess then there are lots of toxic fumes
that get released when electronics are burned which has created serious health
problems in impoverished areas that are economically dependent on this kind of
dangerous manual labor nevertheless it
continues to happen because shipping e waste to a less fortunate part of the
globe is cheaper than processing it at
home of course this isn't meant to be a sociopolitical lecture so let's talk
then about how reputable electronics recycling and disposable Services deal
with your unwanted ghosts from black Friday's past some places like free geek
Vancouver rely on manual volunteer labor
to separate Plastics and metals and the different kinds of plastics and the
different kinds of metals so they can be reused Andor recycled but there are
higher Tech facilities that actually automate this process by using automatic
shredders that will shred your old
processors motherboards and electric toothbrushes without releasing the same
kinds of harsh chemicals into the air that burning does after shredding the
bits of e-waist are sorted Sometimes using optical sensing for increased
accuracy Accord according to the types of materials which are then sold to
other companies that use these reclaimed metals and Plastics in other products
everything from car batteries to Furniture of course if you have
something that's outdated but still functional it's usually better to find a
way to reuse it rather than recycling it
so you can sell or donate it to an organization again like free geek here
in Vancouver that specializes in refurbishing old electronics and
computer Hardware with that said sometimes it's
just broken so if you do have to recycle it make sure you're taking it to a
reputable recycler and not a place that'll just ship it offshore or you
could just sell it to the script Kitty down the street and exchange for your
very own botn net yes speaking of selling things do
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