E-Waste, An Ever Growing Problem

Since it’s Earth Day, I thought I would take a break from showing you some cool electronic gadgets and perhaps make you aware of an ever growing problem in the environment from the electronics industry.

E-Waste (Electronic Waste) is becoming a huge problem throughout the world. We as American produce the most E-waste as we dispose of and attempt to recycle our outdated and obsolete electronics. Much of this out-dated product has toxic materials such as heavy metals like lead, Mercury, Cadmium and Hexavalent chromium.

Image: Newscom

I wrote a short article on E-Waste yesterday at Blisstree Men’s Health. Here is a short excerpt and if you have a moment, head on over to the original article and give it a read. There is also a video about America sending it’s E-Waste to third world countries for recycling and the conditions that the people that are recycling the material in are not exactly healthy.

While the production of electronic goods isn’t really slowing any, the electronics of the past and obsolete is taking it’s toll on the environment. According to a report by Electronicstakeback.com , the world’s population disposes of 20 to 50 million metric tons of e-waste each year and only about 11.4% of that get’srecycled.

That is just a phenomenal amount of waste considering that most of it is old hardware that contains lead, mercury and cadmium. Television sets, computer monitors, circuit boards, batteries, you name it. Sadly a lot of E-waste get’s sent overseas to countries such as China , India , Malaysia, Kenya and various other African countries where it either sits or poor communities work to dismantle it for recycling and disposal, not knowing the health risks that they are taking by handling a lot of this waste.

Think about it next time you go to throw away a TV, motherboard or hard drive…