Recycling Or Donating Computers
Recycling Conserves Natural Resources: Everyone knows that electronics are all made from valuable and sometimes rare resources and materials. This may include metals, plastics, and glass. Thus all of these items require huge amounts of energy to mine and to manufacture. When you donate or recycle e-waste or consumer electronics this of course conserves our natural resources. This means that we will partially avoid large amounts of air and also water pollution. Of course recycling e-waste and computers reduces greenhouse gas emissions that are created when manufacturing virgin materials is necessary. The more computers that are recycled, the less mining raw materials is necessary. This means that recycling or donating computers is necessary for a more sustainable world.
In 2006 the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that at that time:
- The recycling of one million laptops saves an amount of energy equivalent to the electricity used by more than 3,500 American homes in a single year.
- For every one million cell phones that are recycled, 35 thousand pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered.
Recycling Computers Reduces Mining: Yes recycling computers that are properly processed reduce the need for mining raw materials. Some of the materials are rare earth materials that are mined in very environmentally unfriendly manners in some cases. Many of these compounds are literally scraped off the bottom of the ocean. Thus recycling or donating computers makes this type of mining less likely to occur. Recycled hard drives in computers have a lot of rare earth materials. Hard drive recycling is very important.
