E-waste is being produced on a scale never seen before. Computers and other electronic equipment become obsolete in just a few years, leaving customers with little choice to buy newer ones to keep up. Millions of tons of computer, TVs, smartphones, and other equipment are discarded each year. In most countries, all this waste ends up in landfills, where it poisons the environment – e-waste contains many toxic substances such as lead, mercury, and arsenic that leak into the ground.

Recycling is the ideal solution to the problem. E-waste contains significant amounts of valuable metals like gold and silver that make it attractive to recycle. In theory, recycling gold from old computers is more efficient – and less environmentally destructive – than digging it from the earth. The problem is that a large percentage of e-waste dropped off for recycling in wealthy countries is sold and diverted to the developing world, posing an increasing threat to the health of the people there.

To address the problem of the international trade in e-waste, 170 nations signed the 1989 Basel Convention, an agreement requiring that developed nations notify developing nations of hazardous waste shipments coming into their countries. Then, in 1995 the Basel Convention was modified to ban hazardous waste shipments to poor countries completely. Although the ban hasn’t taken effect, the European Union, where recycling infrastructure is well developed, has already written it into their laws. Once law holds manufacturers responsible for the safe disposal of electronics they produce.

Companies like Creative Recycling Systems in Florida, the USA, are hoping to profit from e-waste recycling. The key to their business is a huge, buildings-size machine able to separate electronic products into their component materials. As the machine’s steel teeth break up e-waste, all the toxic dust is removed from the process. This machine can handle some 70,000 tons of electronics a year. Although this is only a fraction of the total, it wouldn’t take many more machines like this to process the entire the USA’s output of high-teeth trash. Unfortunately, under current policies, domestics processing of e-waste is not compulsory, and while shipping waste abroad is ethically questionable, it is still more profitable than processing is safely in the USA. Creative Recycling Systems is hoping that the US government will soon create laws deterring people from sending e-waste overseas.

(Adapted from “Reading Explorer 4” by Paul MacIntyre and Nancy Hubley)