Electronic Waste: A Growing Concern in Today's Environment - 0 views
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Over the past two decades, the global market of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) continues to grow exponentially, while the lifespan of those products becomes shorter and shorter. Therefore, business as well as waste management officials are facing a new challenge, and e-Waste or waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is receiving considerable amount of attention from policy makers.
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yvenisem on 28 Sep 20From this we see technology market is progressing to grow however the lifespan of these items lessesns. In turn, this creates a problem for those that work in the waste managemnent sector and calls for politics to get involved.
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e-Waste has raised concerns because many components in these products are toxic and do not biodegrade easily if at all.
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Most developing countries lack the waste removal infrastructure and technical capacities necessary to ensure the safe disposal of hazardous waste. And e-Waste has been linked to a variety of health problems in these countries, including cancer, neurological and respiratory disorders, and birth defects
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One of the biggest issues is that developing countries do not have the resources or infastructure to properly dispose of e-waste. I know that economics play a huge roll in this issue as 3rd world countries are often used as dumping places for 1st world waste, and these problems are not being addressed because of sytematic limitations. The health concerns are also staggering, they include: cancer, birth defects etc...
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However, even with these regulations, all hazardous materials that are used in newly manufactured products cannot be fully controlled, and management of e-Waste within the supply chain cannot be fully addressed.
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For e-Waste management systems, some of the most successful examples can be found in countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands [16 D. Sinha-Khetriwal, P. Kraeuchi, and R. Widmer, “Producer responsibility for e-waste management: key issues for consideration—learning from the Swiss experience,” Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 153–165, 2009. View at: Publisher Site | Google Scholar See in References ]. Experience of the Swiss e-Waste management system is shown as an example in this paper. Generally, the Swiss e-Waste management system can be viewed as an ERP-based system, where each stakeholder has their own clear definition of role and responsibilities as shown in Table 4.
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The main point of this scientific report was to demonstrate how e-waste is becoming an issue and why the current structures in place today are simply not enough to overcome this issue. The author goes into detail the common issues with e-waste: hazardous materials being disposed of incorrectly, the side effects e-waste has on human and environmental life, how current infrastructures in 3rd world countries are not able to keep up with the waste load, why certain policies aren't enough and how new techniques such as the ones being applied in Nordic countries may be the answer to the issue. Ultimately the author makes the argument for why it is an issue, how the issue is growing, and presents alternatives on how to better tackle the e-waste issue.