Electronic Waste Recycling To Be Or Not To Be?
The amount of electronic waste that we produce each year is
growing at an ever increasing rate, with the rise of cheap consumer electronics
and yearly advances in technology, coupled with our overall desire and demand
for the latest and greatest electronic device that is going to make our lives
so much better using it, than the previous version. Well, what happens to the
old, the broken and thrown out electronics? It becomes electronic waste,
normally in the past, this was like most other types of waste and was used as
land fill, unknowingly or knowingly many of these devices included materials
such as lead, mercury, sulphur or cadmium to name a few, that are considered
hazardous, or dangerous, so putting this material into landfills by the
thousands of tonne loads was causing un-repairable damage to the earth they
were put in.
Human conscience however has changed over the decades, especially when it was
seen that there was the possibility of making a dollar or two, so with that came
the era of recycling. It was realized that materials used in electronic devices
such as gold, silver, copper, tin, aluminum, iron, nickel and plastics just to
name a few, could be processed and removed from electronic waste and sold to be
used in many different ways, this is the modern day gold miner of sorts. Now
there is a drive on throughout the world and the United States to recycle
electronic waste, there has been many laws passed throughout the United States
that require electronic waste to be processed differently to normal waste to
stop it from getting processed into landfills, this in turn boosts the
recycling drive.
90% (ninety percent) of electronic waste in the United
States is sold and exported to China and Nigeria, which makes these countries
look like the modern gold miners and protectors of earth, but is that the
truth?
There is currently a silent battle going on in the world and
it's the world of counterfeit electronic components, the battle is raging
between the counterfeiters who are successfully able to get their poor quality
products into supply chains and the electronic component suppliers who have to
keep up to date with who is supplying them their components and having a strict
quality control system to find and stop the flow of counterfeited products from
getting into the supply market and causing problems when used in manufacturing
devices.
One of the biggest counterfeiting production types is harvesting.
This is the process of removing components from electronic waste, rebranding or
remarking the components and selling them off as new. One of the biggest
producers of counterfeited electronic components is China.
Let's now look at the equation we have The United States
whom sells 90% of its electronic waste to one of the biggest producers of
counterfeited electronic components who uses one of the largest counterfeiting
production types, the harvesting of components from electronic waste.
Is selling most of the electronic waste produced
in the United States to China such a good idea?
There are many Electronic Component distributors around, the best and more technology advanced companies have strict quality control and assurance policies like Electrospec and Electroniclocator
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