Recycle Your Iphone & Electronics With Care

By Author: Don Zone
Total Articles: 5
Comment this article

It is hard to imagine life today without electronics. Majority of the people in the world live their lives day to day working with some kind of electronic gadget. Electronics can be found everywhere in areas such as in healthcare facilities, workplace, educational facilities, and at home. Electronics provides us multiple benefits that allow us to live our lives at ease. However, the positive factors we receive from electronics can quickly turn to a negative factor. Many electronics are not disposed of properly, causing great harm to our environment.

One of the greatest problems we face with electronics today is that they tend to become easily obsolete. With so many great engineers designing new technologies every day, it is inevitable that the electronics you now own are going to be outdated in the near future. For instance, take Apple's iPhone; which was made available to the public in 2007 now has four different versions (iPhone 1g, iPhone 2g, iPhone 3g(s), iPhone 4g). That's four different versions of the iPhone made within 3 years! So where do old electronics end up? In either landfills or are shipped overseas to ...
... 3rd world countries.

You may have been participating in you community's electronic recycling events and thought to yourself that your old electronics didn't make its way in a landfill or even took a boat ride to a 3rd world country; but in reality, many electronic waste collectors taking part in these community Electronic Recycling events tend to sell their collected e-waste to brokers from 3rd world countries. These brokers don't buy old electronics to be re-used; instead, they buy them to be stripped and mined for parts such as gold, silver, lead, and many other valuable components. The rest of the items with no value are either openly burned, dumped in landfills or rivers, damaging our environment.

With very little regulations or plans on disposing electronics, the amount of e-waste will only keep growing exponentially. In the near future, open space in landfills that we have today will have been quickly filled with electronic waste, forcing us to transform other areas of open land into new landfills. What we can do to help prevent the build-up of e-waste is to easily follow the three R's - reduce, reuse, and recycle. It can sometimes be difficult to reduce and reuse, and more convenient to recycle electronics especially when they are over 10 years old. Therefore, when the time comes to recycle your old electronics, be careful when picking a location to take your e-waste. Do some research and ask your electronic recycler the following questions: Where are they going? What happens to them? How do they get recycled?

To find a responsible electronic recycler near you, visit the Basal Action Network (BAN) website at www.ban.org or the e-Stewards website at www.e-stewards.org. The BAN and e-Stewards websites can lead you to a responsible electronic recycling company who has made a pledge to never export e-waste overseas or deposit them in landfills. Be cautious with companies you hand over your e-waste to. You may be doing your part in recycling, but your recyclers may not be doing theirs.

For more information about Electronic Recycling please visit http://www.greencitizen.com/what_we_recycle.php