What Happens to Discarded Electronics?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
886 words · ~4 min read
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not too long ago you probably weren't thinking all that much about electronics
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disposal but nowadays there's a veritable glut of inexpensive portable
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Electronics available around the globe in fact they're so common that some
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countries are starting to treat internet access as a human right and like
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anything else our Electronics wear out over time or at the very least become
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embarrassing when something better comes along which can take a surprisingly
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short amount of time I mean think about how often smartphones get updated so
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what happens to all this stuff when we're done using it does it all go to
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some retro Tech Museum in the sky when
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we throw it away unfortunately no much
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of it simply gets buried in landfills when people throw out their old modems
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or whatever else along with banana peels and that clown toy that Sally never
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wanted to play with for some reason but as you might guess most electronic waste
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or e waste isn't biodegradable and even
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contains toxic metals like Mercury and
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cadmium as well as other not so good chemicals that can leech through
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landfills and end up in groundwater not
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a great situation I mean even if you don't think of yourself as a tree hugger
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you're probably not a big fan of mercury flavored coffee so lots of folks then
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opt to recycle their E-Waste instead of
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just tossing it in the trash but how exactly does Electronics Rec cycling
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work well sorry to bust your happy
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carbon neutral bubble but the Inconvenient Truth is that it often
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doesn't although there are lots of places that advertise electronic waste
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disposal much of it doesn't actually end up disposed of properly at all instead
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much of it is shipped off to poor countries for Reclamation where things
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like circuit boards are literally set on
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fire or dunked into acid so the workers
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can go dig through it afterwards and recover useful materials such as copper
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and gold so as you might be able to guess then there are lots of toxic fumes
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that get released when electronics are burned which has created serious health
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problems in impoverished areas that are economically dependent on this kind of
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dangerous manual labor nevertheless it
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continues to happen because shipping e waste to a less fortunate part of the
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globe is cheaper than processing it at
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home of course this isn't meant to be a sociopolitical lecture so let's talk
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then about how reputable electronics recycling and disposable Services deal
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with your unwanted ghosts from black Friday's past some places like free geek
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Vancouver rely on manual volunteer labor
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to separate Plastics and metals and the different kinds of plastics and the
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different kinds of metals so they can be reused Andor recycled but there are
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higher Tech facilities that actually automate this process by using automatic
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shredders that will shred your old
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processors motherboards and electric toothbrushes without releasing the same
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kinds of harsh chemicals into the air that burning does after shredding the
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bits of e-waist are sorted Sometimes using optical sensing for increased
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accuracy Accord according to the types of materials which are then sold to
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other companies that use these reclaimed metals and Plastics in other products
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everything from car batteries to Furniture of course if you have
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something that's outdated but still functional it's usually better to find a
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way to reuse it rather than recycling it
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so you can sell or donate it to an organization again like free geek here
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in Vancouver that specializes in refurbishing old electronics and
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computer Hardware with that said sometimes it's
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just broken so if you do have to recycle it make sure you're taking it to a
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reputable recycler and not a place that'll just ship it offshore or you
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could just sell it to the script Kitty down the street and exchange for your
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very own botn net yes speaking of selling things do
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freshbooks.com tequ and enter Techquickie in the how did You Hear About Us
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section thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other channels
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