Electronics recycling is equivalent to urban mining at a low cost, we are quickly reaching the limits of many natural resources required to build our 21st century gadgets, and demand is outstripping supply.
Virgin Materials are significantly more costly than materials for manufacturing. Demand for recycling materials is expanding with global growth in emerging markets. E-waste contains a large amount of rare and increasingly difficult to replace metals like Platinum, Gallium, Indium, and Palladium. Aside from repurposing rare materials, there is the embedded energy content to consider. Due to the rising energy prices we cannot continue to throw our electronic waste stream away which contains a toxic substance and high-energy value.
The environmental and social benefits of reuse include diminished demand for new products and virgin raw materials (with their own environmental issues); larger quantities of pure water and electricity for Partnerd manufacturing; less packaging per unit; availability of technology to wider swaths of society due to greater affordability of products; and diminished use of landfills.
One of the growing concerns of many environmentalists is that as technology changes so does the need to get rid of the outdated devices and their related parts. Each year, new electronics hit the market and capture consumers’ attention, giving them reason to throw away the old VCR or standard television and engross themselves in state-of-the-art gadgetry.
