Master Law with Fun Quizzes & Brain Teasers!
Consider how much tech you touch in your livesnot just at home, but at school, work, shopping. In the United States, the e-waste volume amounts to about 42 pounds per person annually, and while e-waste is only about 2 percent of waste, it represents more than two-thirds of discarded toxic, heavy metals. This "effluent of the affluent" will only increase with the rise of living standards worldwide.The quick answer would be to recycle this stuff. Not only does e-waste contain mainstream recyclable materials we're all familiar with, like plastics and aluminum, it also contains small bits of increasingly valuable metals such as silver, platinum, and copper. In fact, a ton of discarded smartphones contains more than 100 times the amount of gold than is found in a ton of ore. Done right, recycling produces far less CO2 emissions and other pollution than mining, and it's 13x cheaper to extract precious and rare earth metals from discarded electronics than it is to mine it from the earth.