Shredding and pulverizing e-waste

Because of the material and design complexity of electronics, recycling them is much more complicated, energy intense and polluting than recycling for most other goods—and it gets more complicated every year. The silicon chip is a good example. It is very small and made of a complex mix of plastics, metals and alloys, all coated and soaked in 400 or more chemicals. Each part of the chip has different recycling needs, so you need very specialist equipment. It’s a nightmare. Not worth it, according to classical economics. Dumping perfectly good working chips makes much better business sense.

For what e-waste is recycled, the usual first step, in which millions of women and children are involved, requires collecting and sorting the waste into various categories. Flammable and explosive materials, such as batteries, need to be separated. “For example, the toner that can be found in a photocopier is extremely flammable and explosive and is certainly capable of blowing up the processing equipment if it gets shredded,” Tin Lok Wu wrote for Earth.org. This is labor-intensive, cumbersome, truly unhealthy and dangerous work, and that’s why so much of it is shipped from the Global North to the