E-waste - ISLANDS

The gold jewellery made from old phones

Hello e-waste community! I just came across this really interesting article explaining how the Royal Mint, the UK's official coin producer, has been recovering metals from electronic waste. They have patented a clean, energy-efficient way which could extracts up to 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones.

This particularly interesting because
a. Gold is rare and the environmental cost of mining ore to get just a tiny amount of gold is enormous.
b. 155,000 tonnes of small electrical waste - containing gold and other recyclable materials- is thrown away every year.
c. 7% of the world's gold is currently sitting in disused electronics.

I really find urban mining - recovering precious metals from existing waste products - incredibly fascinating. And you?

Read the article below to find out more!

Recycle metals instead of seabed mining

The conversation around deep sea mining is a growing in the Pacific, since precious metals have been discovered in PNG, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Niue, Palau, Samoa, and Tuvalu waters.

Although deep sea mining could bring profits to these countries, could also put them at risk in case of accidents, oil spills, ecosystem distractions etc.

Some, like Jonathan Mesulam an activist from PNG, argue for strengthening recycling of precious material (for example from e-waste) rather than sea bed mining.

"Why not do something innovative, like recycling the metals that we have, instead of digging up our oceans? The seafloor should be the last option".

What's your opinion on sea bed mining? Should we recycle more instead?
Let us know in the comments!

? Did you miss our latest ISLANDS webinar on Sharing SIDS Best Practices on E-waste Management?

? Watch the recording at the link below!

https://www.gefislands.org/webinar/islands-webinars-sharing-sids-best-p…

?E-waste is electrical and electronic equipment that has reached the end of its useful life. Over 40 million tons of e-waste are discarded in landfills, burned or illegally traded annually – threating ecosystems and human health.

?Because e-waste is full of valuable elements that can be recycled and reused, it also presents considerable socio-economic opportunities.

?️ ISLANDS is assisting SIDS to improve e-waste recycling practices.

?Want to know more about e-waste? Watch this reel! https://www.ggkp.org/Zfu

Tremendous short video from Kenyan spoken word poet Beatrice Kariuki on e-waste, contained in this feature from UNEP. There is clearly a pollution crisis facing the world but my heart is constantly lifted by the creativity and talent of young people who are so passionate about the environment. We have no alternative but to continue raising our voices.

An in-depth journal on the e-waste generation in the Caribbean SIDS, their place against the global trend in e-waste generation, SIDS-specific obstacles in setting up waste management systems, and more interesting figures & indicators.

The paper uses a dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) approach to estimate the flows and stocks of the 10 main e-waste categories across 5 Caribbean SIDS which are Aruba, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. While merely representing 11% of the Caribbean population and 7% of the Caribbean land area, they produced the double the e-waste per capita per year compared to the global average, and has been estimated to record a rising number of e-waste generated per year; from 27,500 tonnes in 2010 to around 59,000 tonnes in 2025.

With systemic challenges lying in setting up waste management in SIDS, such as lack of available land and financing measures, vulnerability extreme weathers, higher operational expenditures, small market sizes and more, there are also challenges in terms of data retrieval because the Caribbean lacks baseline data to the annual quantity of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) consumption and the corresponding amount e-waste generated. Trinidad and Tobago was also estimated to face higher pressure to deal with the e-waste generation among the 5 countries monitored.

With the amount of 10 main e-waste types (e.g., household appliances, IT equipment, lighting equipment, etc.) growing and eventually taking up majority of the EEE put-on-market (consumed) which also has been saturated from 2017, the article calls for a transition from the current linear take- make- waste economy to a Circular Economy, closing the loops through recycling, reuse, refurbishment, and remanufacturing.

Food for thought for SIDS. The French Government is making efforts to reduce e-waste, by paying for repairs. ISLANDS will be building a remaking workshop, to facilitate electronic repair in Samoa - by doubling the life of e-waste we can half the amount of e-waste produced. See World Economic Forum short video for more information.