eWaste open to abuse
Although eWaste only accounts for 2% to 3% of the substance of landfills it contributes about 60% of the toxicity of landfill sites. This is according to African Sky’s Johnny Clegg who was speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town yesterday.
Clegg, the famous South Africa singer, said that there were many misconceptions about eWaste and its consequences. Among these, he said, was that companies would not be held liable for illegal dumping of old IT equipment. Clegg said that just because old IT equipment had been handed over to a "recycler", companies were obliged to ensure that equipment was correctly and safely recycled.
Clegg said that in South Africa there was a lack of proper recycling facilities. He said that recyclers locally were in fact separators and not recyclers. What this meant for companies, he said, was that they must find out where the separated IT equipment went once it left local shores. He said countries such as China and parts of Europe had proper recycling facilities.
Clegg also said that the eWaste sector often attracted criminal elements and organised crime. He said that while the mining industry typically extracted one ounce of gold from one ton of rock, one ton of PC boards yielded as much as six ounces of gold. This made illegal recycling attractive to criminal elements who were able to export the raw waste and import the profits, said Clegg.
Clegg said that one of the other problems with eWaste was that manufacturers did not build a recycling cost into their costs. He said that in European countries PC makers were obliged to include a recycling cost in their production costs to cover the end-of-life disposal of their products.
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