E-Waste
Your personal computer contains a medley of metals, including gold, silver, aluminum, lead, copper, iron, zinc, and tin. Many of these materials could be salvaged at the end of the computer’s life and recycled.
But currently, most discarded computers are dumped in landfills or incinerated. Incineration of electronic waste, or e-waste, releases heavy metals and dioxin into the atmosphere. The landfill option is also polluting. In the United States, about 70 percent of the heavy metals in landfills come from e-waste.
These metals can leach into the soil and groundwater. Exposure to them has been shown to cause a range of injuries, including abnormal brain development in children, nerve damage, disruption of the endocrine system, and damage to various organs.
Because it contains substantial quantities of valuable metals, e-waste is an international traded commodity. Many junked computers make their way to developing countries, mostly in Asia, where some of the metal is salvaged. These salvaging operations are usually very crude and operate outside an environmental or labor regulations.
An investigation of one such operation, in Guiyu, a village in China’s Guangdong Province, found workers dismantling computer equipment with hammers, chisels, screw drivers, and their bare hands. Only the most readily extracted metal components were recovered. For example, workers would crack open monitors, extract the copper “yoke,” then dump the smashed equipment in a field or push it into a river. Area residents say the local water is now too foul-tasting to drink; drinking water is now trucked into the area from 30 kilometers away.
In the U.S., there is very little regulation of e-waste. Currently less than 20% of U.S. e-waste is recovered for recycling – just 10% of PCs and 14% of TVs. And with the upcoming switch to digital TVs it is expected to make the problem worse – as people throw away their old televisions, the amount of toxic cathode-ray tubes in landfills will increase and so too the emitting into the atmosphere and leaching into the soil of other toxic chemicals.