Mobile phones, television sets, computers, lap tops, DVD players, game consoles, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, water heaters, stoves. These are all items we use almost every day that all have a limited life expectancy. As electronics become cheaper, we tend to throw them away more. So can you imagine the amount of electronic equipment that gets thrown into the nearest garbage container?
Since these devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives, the volume of electronic waste produces worldwide reached 40 million tons last year, and it continues to grow.
Electronic waste is a type of waste with high contaminant levels, and it poses a serious threat to the environment. This type of waste mostly contains heavy metal substances such as bromine, cadmium, phosphorous, mercury, arsenic and cobalt. Any one of these materials is dangerous on its own, and can wreak havoc when it gets in contact with soil or water. The gasses they emit contribute to the greenhouse effect that keeps destroying our climate.
So the fact is that just recklessly throwing away any of your electronic equipment poses a great risk to both the environment and our health. Therefore, the only viable solution to his problem is to implement the rule of three Rs into our daily lives – reduce, reuse and recycle.
Reduce means to limit the use of products in our everyday lives only to the most essential ones. Reusing means that no product should be discarded as long as there’s a possibility for it to be used again. If you can’t find a use for it, there’s always someone who can, so always consider donating the item to charity or giving it to friends and family.
And when the product can no longer be reused, it’s time for it to get recycled. Some countries even passed laws that require all old electronic to be recycled and introduced fines if they’ve been disposed of along with other waste. So, when you no longer want an electronic device, what you should do is take to a special collection point in your city or neighborhood. From there, it can be transported to a recycling facility where all working parts will be salvaged, all toxic materials removed, and everything else recycled.
In Spain, only about 20% of all electronic waste gets disposed of this way, and even less of it gets recycled properly.
To avoid further damage from electronic waste, specialized collection and recycling companies must be hired, using the best recycling machines available. A good example of this is the Lyrsa Group, which specializes in safe disposal of electronic equipment. The aim of the company is to recycle as much electronic equipment as they can, in order to create a safer and a more sustainable environment. They also specialize in producing new electronics from recycled raw materials, and are also developing new technologies that will make that process faster and easier. The Lyrsa company also provides logistical solutions when it comes to waste collection and transportation, and has its own fleet of trucks and containers. plastic recycling machine