"I've been driving around with a broken blender for a month now, I know I'm not supposed to throw it in the bin but not sure where to take it. The same goes for mobile phones...my drawer is a graveyard for phones."
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Many of us have gadgets that are no longer working, but somehow we know we shouldn't just toss them out.
These days, we all have a variety of electrical or electronic gadgets from a myriad of kitchen appliances to computers, laptops, mobile phones, gaming devices, battery-operated toys, power tools and more.
Once they stop working or we have updated the device, what do we do with it?
This is all about e-waste.
So what is e-waste? Put simply, e-waste is anything with a plug, cord or a battery required to make it operate and it becomes waste when it is no longer in working order or we no longer require it.
With the ban on e-waste going into landfill coming into effect on July 1, 2019 in Victoria, we cannot put it into any of our kerbside collection bins.
To assist in collecting e-waste, the Victorian Government has provided councils with assistance to build new infrastructure at Transfer Stations and councils have placed additional collection points in public places.
While we cannot do anything about our current e-waste, can we do better to manage our electrical and electronic devices? We can lengthen their life or even repair them so they do not need to be thrown away.
While e-waste is a global issue, Australians are among the highest users and disposers of technology. In fact, in Australia e-waste is growing up to three times faster than general waste.
In 2008, 106,000 tonnes of televisions, computers and computer products reached end-of-life in Australia. By 2013, this volume had grown to 138,000 tonnes. Without significant measures to reduce it, this figure will grow to approximately 223,000 tonnes in 2023-24.
While keeping things out of landfill is an important part of dealing with e-waste, there are two other reasons for being proactive about recycling our e-waste:
- It contains valuable reusable materials
- It prevents hazardous materials harming the environment or human health
Most e-waste contains hazardous materials from heavy metals such as lead and mercury to ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and flame retardants.
But there are also valuable and recyclable materials in many e-waste items.
With more than one million mobile phones discarded in Australia every year, if we recycled all of them, we could recover up to 16 tonnes of copper, 350 kilograms of silver and 34 kilograms of gold.
