most of us have way more unused
electronics than we think we do
seriously go through your desk or
closets your toolbox and pull out
anything with a power cord or a battery
that you're not using pile it all up and
you might be shocked the average family
has 80 pieces of electronic waste lying
around their home that's a lot of
clutter we just don't need but it also
means that your house is a literal
goldmine we just have to do the mining
we produce a lot of electronics which
means that all of this tech is quickly
becoming the fastest growing source of
garbage on the planet and the term
e-waste refers to all of it from your
first iPhone to your first laptop to
even your electric toothbrush the list
goes on and off you waste is such a
challenge to process because it contains
so many materials plastics metals and
some of it's toxic but it's also a big
opportunity for recycling because a
cellphone like this one contains a few
rare and valuable materials a big one is
gold and it's found in a lot of
electronics because it's highly
conductive and it doesn't corrode very
easily so you tend to find gold coating
on pins and plugs and print it on
circuit boards but there's also copper
silver lead and palladium in there it's
not much per device but as a wave piles
up the amount of reclaimed vil metals in
there piles up too and then there was
this study published earlier this year
and it made a pretty wild claim
recovering metals like gold from a waste
is now more efficient than digging it up
out of the earth Angela Chen covered the
story for The Verge and she explained
how that's possible so we have the
earths and on average there's about half
a gram of gold in one ton of earth now
of course there are gold mines and
various places on the earth there if you
have one ton of earth you get about five
or six grams which is about the weight
of kind of a large ring and when it
comes to be wasted mobile phones the
number is much higher so say you have a
ton of mobile phones there's actually
350 grams of gold in there and that's a
lot higher even than
and of one of the gold lines there is
the beauty of metals like gold is that
no matter what process you subject them
to in manufacturing they're not going to
change gold is still gold whether it's
been bonded onto a circuit board or dug
out of a rock I think that just for lack
of a better term metals are natural most
the time we you know we've been doing
metalworking for thousands of years and
we already know that to cast them the
first place they're liquid so to melt
them back it's a state that they've
already fed in but there are a couple of
roadblocks here one is that a waste
needs to enter the recycling ecosystem
to be processed and clearly lots of it
never does and I think for most of us
were nostalgic we have you know these
feelings so she ate with them what if I
Kurt MacBook breaks and we're so
dependent we'll just need to use an old
one and that makes it harder for us to
let go and even if eat waste makes it
out of your house it's got a long road
ahead you need a very specialized
process to separate the valuable stuff
from the worthless stuff from the
hazardous stuff verge reporter Andy
Hawkins followed some you waste through
a huge recycling center in Massachusetts
a while back and he came back with some
pretty intense photos so either you live
in a city that has dedicated you waste
pickup which are few and far between or
you have to actually drop off your
e-waste at a dedicated recycling center
either way the the e-waste is collected
and it's shipped to a sorting facility
where it's separated in terms of the
types of e-waste that your you're
talking about so whether you're talking
about laptops flat-screen televisions
smartphones drones cameras all that
stuff has to be separated out into their
own separate piles and then those piles
are then transported to a bigger
recycling center where they're just
destroyed I mean they're just ripped
apart you smashed into tiny little bits
shredded most likely so that you can
separate sort of the recyclable material
things like gold and aluminum from the
stuff that just needs to get discarded
and throw it into the waste stream like
plastic and wood and things like that
that's just the fate of e-waste that
stays in the United States but sadly
most of it doesn't the United States is
the only developed country in the world
that hasn't ratified the Basel
convention which prohibits the export of
e-waste to other nations so legally or
otherwise lots of our waste ends up in
developing countries like
China and South Africa so it's an
incredibly toxic process breaking down a
lot of this e-waste and I think that's
why you're seeing a lot of this shifting
to overseas into countries that are
poorer and have less regulatory and
government oversight there have been
reports about mountains of discarded
electronics that have been building up
in countries like China and India and
it's poisoning the water it's poisoning
the land and it's leading to a lot of
environmental concerns and health
concerns amongst the people especially
children that live near these mountains
of discarded electronics so look there's
a lot of opportunity and need for a
waste recycling but it's a dangerous and
tedious process and reclaiming all that
gold will take a lot more than us just
emptying our closets but empty your
closets anyways recycle your old
electronics you'll be amazed to find
what you have laying around
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