What is ethical IT recycling?
The WEEE Directive is in place to prevent reusable, toxic or hazardous materials entering landfill in the UK or being 'dumped' anywhere else in the world.
Recycling IT for wildlife guarantees your old IT equipment is disposed of within the UK responsibly and any profits go directly to support UK wildlife.
The best way to recycle IT equipment is to extend the lifetime of the product by re-using it. However, if this isn't possible, then by sorting through the different components and collecting bulk volumes, it becomes financially viable to recycle and extract valuable raw materials. This is the process adopted by Recycling IT for wildlife, which means very little of the disposed product cannot be re-used and any equipment or funds raised go directly to support UK wildlife.
Some unscrupulous recycling companies make huge profits cherry picking the equipment which can be resold and then pack the remainder in a container to be dumped in landfill elsewhere in the world.
"The fundamental problem with electronic equipment is that it is designed in a very bad way," says Kim Schoppink, a campaigner at the Dutch branch of Greenpeace who travelled to Ghana to look at the issue in 2008.
"That makes it very expensive to recycle in Europe and therefore it is often dumped in developing countries."
- E-waste includes TVs, telephones, computers, white goods and everyday household electrical items from toasters to toys
- These items contains valuable metals but also toxic heavy metals and hazardous chemicals that are handled by workers, some of them children
- Circuit boards are prized as scrap because they contain gold, silver, copper & other valuable elements
- These can only be retrieved safely by using specialised recycling procedures
- "Backyard recycling" may expose people to dangerous substances such as lead and mercury, dioxins from burning plastic and hazardous leaching agents such as cyanide
"They take some copper and aluminium and the rest they burn," says Ms Schoppink.
"With this burning process a lot of toxic chemicals are released and these workers are exposed to that every day."
Source: Aidan Lewis BBC News, Rotterdam
