Home appliances are one of the main contributors to electronic waste. In order for us to reduce our e-waste impact on the world, we need to understand more about how e-waste disposal affects the environment.
Electronic gadgets have made living very comfortable and convenient for us all. Gone are the days when we had to do many things manually. Most of the work that you could imagine has an electronic gadget or appliance that addresses that problem. But with the onset of these electronics, a new problem came into the picture. Our world today is facing the growing threat to the environment, and it is called electronic wastes.
Home appliances are one of the most abundant electronic wastes around just because of sheer variety. Every house has a hair dryer, or a toaster oven, or an electric fan, or anything that uses electricity for that matter. A lot of these things get disposed of though after they start to malfunction, or after a new model comes out in the market. Although one could just repair an old electronic gadget or appliance, buying a new hair iron that is a newer model seems like the better choice since you wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of repairing that old piece of junk that you had, and it is only slightly more expensive to get a new one too! Throwing away that (insert appliance here) seems like the “smarter choice”, and doing so shouldn’t be too bad right?
Does the situation above sound familiar? Well guess what, almost everyone thinks like this, and this is why piles and piles of trash keep coming into landfills and incinerators. These household appliances are cheap to make, and are readily available for purchase in almost any major mall, but they also contain high levels of toxic heavy metals that are considered as persistent, meaning they don’t decompose in our normal environment, and bio accumulative, which means that they can build up in a person’s fat tissue, which means that it can possibly reach toxic levels over time.
A huge number of what everybody calls “e-waste” is actually not waste at all, but rather they are either fully or partly functional electronic equipment or parts that can be reused if given to other people, or they can be recycled for materials recovery so that the extracted materials can be used for something else. This is even truer for household appliances. How much can you change the function of a hair iron, or a toaster, or a radio? You can upgrade to a better model, but be responsible about your trash.
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