Recycling e-waste helps recover important natural resources, like silver and
gold, for reuse and decreases environmental impact. Recycling is a better,
environmentally friendly solution, far better finding these metals in existing
products, exploiting new places and impacting the environment more. Recycling
is basically the science of reusing waste thus detrimental effects to environment
is minimalized.
Many companies help recycling by offering to take back and part exchange
old laptops, computers ect. Recently there has been a big boom in the
emergence of companies wanting to buy old mobile phones such as
Musumo.com and Buy a phone.com. These companies use the green angle in
their advertising.
There are collection points governed by legitimate e-waste recyclers for
recycling old electronics, which are disposed of onsite. The waste is crushed up
and transported through a conveyer belt. The process works by using magnetic
fields to extract different elements or components. These processing points are
available in the UK and most of Europe however high costs have inhibited the
spread of these points in the United States and developing nations.