Harmful e-waste recycling
Buying more and more products has been a trend for materialistic people. They want to accumulate more new things whether they use them or not. Only because they can buy, they will buy for any reason. They want do away with their old outdated product, and want to show off new ones in public just after its launch. The day latest and updated version of an electronic product comes in market, the last becomes waste for these people.
Such waste of electronic products or devices is e-waste. These waste of electronic devices or their broken parts are dumped by their users. Finally, they may become part of a garbage pile before reaching an e-waste site. These ‘Digital dumpsites’ are now a growing threat to children and natural resources, says a report. This is due to the illegal processing of old electrical or electronic devices, extremely harmful for the health of children.
Protect most valuable resource – children
According to World Health Organization (WHO) report on toxic threat, the health of children, adolescents and expectant mothers globally is at risk due to this illegal processing. The UN health agency has warned on growing health treat coinciding with the mounting ‘tsunami of e-waste’. In this case, the WHO statement cited the efforts of protecting seas and oceans from plastic and microplastic. It emphasized the need of protecting children from the rising threat of e-waste.
The UN health agency reported that discarded electronic devices or e-waste is now the world’s fastest growing domestic waste segment. As per the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership (GESP) report, total global e-wastage in 2019 stood at 53.6 million tonnes. However, only 17.4 percent comes in record as collected and appropriately recycled. What happened with the remaining e-waste is still unknown. We cannot speculate that it was managed and recycled in and environment-friendly way.
While some of the e-waste goes to landfills, a large part of that is illegally shipped to low-and-middle-income nations. In these countries, informal workers, including children and adolescents, pick it through and dismantle. They even give acid baths to these discarded items to extract valuable metals and materials out of them. Nearly 12.9 million women work in the informal waste sector, potentially exposing themselves and their unborn children to toxic residue, says WHO.
Harmful e-waste health effects
An additional over 18 million youngsters, many under five, are actively working in larger industries, which deal with e-waste processing. These informal techniques of extracting materials from e-waste result in several health effects, particularly in children, WHO cautions. Going through their vital stages of physical and neurological development, children, adolescents and pregnant women are at biggest risks while engaging with e-waste sector. The most vulnerable to the effects of toxic chemicals are children.
Children absorb pollutants relative to their size, and unlike adults, they don’t have fully-developed organs, they are less able to exterminate harmful substances from their body. “Improper e-waste management is a rising issue that many countries do not recognize yet as a health problem”, said WHO lead author Marie-Noel Brune Drisse. The impacts of e-waste processing can have devastating effects children’s health, with a heavy burden on health sector in coming years, she asserts.
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