Circular economy, is the economy ensuring cyclic flow of components, where everything is considered as a resource and nothing is a waste. The motive of circular economy is to ensure:
- limited use of raw material,
- reducing the purchase, by promoting repair/ refurbishment
- minimizing the use of energy, carbon emissions and generating minimal waste
Urban areas has huge supply of metals in the form of household waste, waste from demolished building and e-waste. The process of extracting metals from these urban sources and obsolete products is known as urban mining. Electronics industry uses a variety of metals, plastics, and chemicals for the manufacturing of electronic product. The metals that are most commonly used, includes copper, lithium, tin, silver, gold, nickel, palladium, and aluminum. Sadly, this all, along with the e-waste, ends up in the landfill. This improper disposal is very harmful for the environment, as it contains many toxic elements and chemicals e.g. mercury, lead, beryllium, brominated flame retardants, cadmium, arsenic etc. Nowadays, E-waste is the most pressing issue concerning to the resource utilization and sustainable development. With the improper disposal of these harmful elements, it does a lot of harm to the environment, from affecting the human health to harming the ecosystem, e-waste has a variety of negative consequences associated.
E-waste in UP, Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/lucknow/up-ranks-third-in-e-waste-generation-but-no-recycling-unit/story-ZF4myy1ZqbCqUWVVtdMjNM.html
This implies, proper treatment of e-waste is essential to prevent its detrimental effect on the environment and human.
So, what's the solution?
The above discussion signifies, treatment of e-waste is of utmost importance to block its dangerous effects on humans and environment. Extending the lifecycle of electronics by promoting reuse or refurbishment is definitely helpful in reducing the landfill waste. This is what the motive of circular economy.
But what should be done with the e-waste, once the life cycle of these product ends. First of all, try not to consider this as a waste instead consider this, a treasure of precious elements 😊. Yes you read it right, let me explain you how, in the coming section.
Appropriate treatment of e-waste is not only good for preventing air, water and soil toxicity but can also be utilized for recovering the precious elements. This is beneficial, as urban growth has increased the demand for precious metals, rare earth elements etc. E-waste may contain 60 elements, and most of them are recoverable. E-waste not only contains huge quantity of iron and aluminium, but also can be utilized as a great source of gold, silver, copper, platinum, and palladium. Thus, urban mining has the potential of reducing the burden of extracting the virgin minerals from the earth.
Globally the world generates, around 40 million tons of e-waste every year. 85% of this waste ends up in the landfills, instead of the fact, it holds a lot of economic value. Mobile phones contributes the most in the electronic waste. Let's take a look how much economic value these phones hold from the figure below:
Urban mining has lot of advantages over primary mining:
- less mining for natural resources means less land damage
- generally the material needed is already everywhere in the form of e-waste, which means transportation cost and energy is saved
- less landfill load, and if e-waste is handled with proper care and treatment, this can prevent pollution and toxicity of soil, air and water, which generally arises from the presence of harmful chemicals in the electronic waste (e.g. lead, barium, cadmium, mercury etc.)
- helps in meeting resource needs, if a nation is in resource crisis
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