The world is drowning in millions of tonnes of electronic stuff we chuck away. (Photo: Global Report on e-waste)
Don Pinnock – 17 July 2024
Where do your old smartphones, laptops, washing machines, digital cameras, refrigerators and external hard drives go when they give up the ghost? We should recycle, but mostly we don’t.
Your smartphone died so you had to buy another one. The dead one will languish in a drawer for a while but inevitably you’ll bin it. At which point you will feed a global statistic. It will become part of about 70 million tonnes of global e-waste that would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks which, bumper-to-bumper, could encircle the equator – and poison the planet…