E-waste: The Economic and Environmental Costs

After six years of loyally using the same laptop, I finally decided it was time to upgrade. I bought a new computer and transferred all of my personal things to this new one… But didn’t know what to do next. All of my old electronics were small enough to be kept hidden away in a drawer somewhere, but I now had a chunky, seven pound electronic ‘brick’ sitting on my bookshelf. My friends had some ‘helpful’ suggestions for ways to get rid of it – from throwing it away to throwing it out of the second floor window! Thankfully I decided to ignore all of these suggestions.
I knew it was bad to dump e-waste into landfills (see more here: theecoguide.org/world-waste-impacts-e-waste), but I didn’t know how bad, and especially in how many ways. Not only do electronics contain toxic heavy metals that can be leached into the soil, but they also contain valuable precious metals such as copper, gold (7-10% of the world’s gold), silver (30% of the world’s silver) palladium and platinum – the same metals we burn countless tonnes of fossil fuels and produce countless tonnes of waste over trying to mine – so we are losing out by throwing away these rare metals.