Electronics Waste: Recycling of Mobile Phones

As the consumption of electronics products has increased the management of new type of waste, electronics waste (e-waste, WEEE), has become a global concern. Countries in the European Union are creating 17kg e-waste per capita annually and developing markets such as China and India are currently creating 1kg e-waste per capita a year. The amounts are expected to be rising in the future, and the joint disposal of e-waste together with municipal waste cannot continue (Chancerel &Rotter, 2009). E-waste contains many recyclable materials such as ferrous metals and aluminum, copper and precious metals as well as different engineering plastics. These are typically highly integrated into each other. This means that recycling of electronics products is technologically more complicated than for example glass or paper recycling. Most importantly disposal of e-waste causes loss of these valuable, non-renewable resources as electronics products contain wide range of valuable materials, many of them becoming scarce in the nature. Depletion of raw material sources together with increasing need for materials in manufacturing of new products together mean that collection and recycling of obsolete products becomes more and more important. Electronics waste recycling processes may also pose a risk to environment if electronic products are not treated in a proper manner at their end of life stage. Substances of concern may leak to the environment or cause health and safety risk at the treatment phase. Examples of improper treatment of e-waste are widely presented in the literature. The trend has been in the electronics industry to remove the potentially hazardous materials from the products so that there is smaller risk of contamination even if the improper recycling practices take place.