The Dangers of Technology Waste

Technology waste has become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South's landfill sites. This electronic waste is currently 5% of all global waste and is set to increase more due to our technological advancements we constantly have. Instead of recycling our electronic waste, most of the waste goes to  Agogbloshie in the outskirts of  Ghana’s capital, Accra. It is the biggest e-waste dump in the world, where 10,000 informal workers wade through tons of discarded goods as part of an enormous, informal recycling process. They risk their health for the sake of  searching for the precious metals that are found in our discarded smartphones. A recent report found Agbogbloshie contained some of the most hazardous chemicals on earth. This is not surprising to us in the sustainable tech world because smartphones contain mercury, lead and even arsenic. The source of the problem is Europe and North America. The European Union and the United States alone contribute to almost one half of the total e-waste generated annually, amounting to 50 million metric tons. Only the manufacturers can fix this, by creating a circular hardware economy. A more economically sustainable and politically possible solution is through incentivizing hardware manufacturers to make the repair, reuse and recycling of hardware profitable.

This type of waste could be a very easy fix if manufacturing companies included a recycling program to reuse old phone, laptops, and other electronics instead of letting them go into landfills like the one in Agbogbloshie. This type of waste is not known vastly known about because mostly people talk about the dangers of plastic waste, and while that is still a problem for the environment, this type of waste is not only hurting the environment it is hurting the people who work with the waste too. It is an overall a health risk to everything. I think that if the public becomes more educated on this topic they could put more pressure on the electronic manufacturing companies to create a type of recycling programs to help reduce this waste. 




Link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/tech-waste-is-a-danger-to-us-all/