When people usually think of the impact of E-waste, there is a focus on the distant future. Creating a brighter future for our children is important, but too often we forget about the current ongoing negative impact on both our environment and people. It’s important to highlight the costs on personal and environmental health that are being felt today so we can better understand what a future without change might look like. In this post we seek to educate about the personal and environmental dangers of informal recycling and waste mismanagement and how formal recycling centers are working to mitigate these dangers.
What is informal recycling?
Informal recycling is the collection, sorting, and processing of materials outside of formal waste management. In countries where recycling infrastructure is lacking individuals will wade through landfills and waste streams in search of paper, plastic, glass, and most commonly metal from electronics. In some cases these metals are processed and extracted by burning piles of garbage in the open air and picking the metals out. These materials are then sold to middlemen recyclers that further process and sell these materials to manufacturers.
Why is informal recycling bad for our health?
E-waste is bad for the individual just as it is for the environment. In a formal recycling facility, personal protective gear (PPE) is provided to protect recyclers from chemicals, heavy metals, and other hazardous substances that can cause respiratory illness, skin disease, and body pain and soreness, and much more. Formal recyclers also use clean and more effective means of extracting metals such as shredding, chemical dissolution, magnetic separation, and manual or mechanical separation whereas informal recyclers resort to burning which contaminates air, water and soil and ultimately our bodies.
What leads to informal recycling?
Informal recycling is a result of socio-economic issues and lack of availability of formal recyclers and recycling regulatory bodies. Informal recycling yields very low incomes, often barely enough for individuals in countries where the practice is common to survive. In turn, informal recyclers are often generationally poor from marginalized communities, and the practice of informal recycling continues the lack of social and economic mobility ensuring the next generation are recyclers. A lack of access to healthcare and lack of social protections from these conditions that cause poverty worsens the outlook for these groups.
How are formal recycling centers and governments working towards a solution?
Addressing these issues requires a multi-faceted approach that includes improving waste management infrastructure, formalizing recycling systems, providing support and protections for informal recyclers, and addressing underlying socio-economic disparities. NGO’s (non-government organizations), government recycling jobs, and recycling training programs work to transition informal recyclers into formal recyclers. Formal recyclers in areas where informal recycling is common are able to broker cooperatives to integrate informal recyclers into the system. From the socio-economic side training and cooperatives are also necessary to increase the negotiating power of informal recyclers in the volatile e-waste market. Ultimately an individualized approach to policy and infrastructure will establish best practices in these regions and data collection about e-waste is critical in determining how best to help.
Conclusion:
Informal recycling is a net negative for the environment, economy, and health of everyone. We can no longer view the impact of improper recycling as the issue of tomorrow when families, countries, and people’s lives and livelihoods are burning off in thick black clouds of toxic waste here and now. Establishing best practices leads to clean and sustainable recycling today in these regions and creates opportunity to clean our world and opportunity to uplift its citizens. Information collection and collaboration between regulators, NGO’s, and formal recyclers seek to illuminate this path for a brighter future.
