To recycle your e-waste see our e-waste recycling page.
Electronic waste (e-waste or WEEE) is the fastest growing sector of the waste stream and it contains all manner of toxic materials including lead, mercury, and cadmium. Recycling of e-waste into e-scrap prevents the natural environment from being polluted, reduces our reliance on new mineral extraction, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and can help improve human rights issues.
E-waste could be defined as any discarded item that is able to conduct electricity and is not recycled or reused. Major e-waste items are computers and other types of IT equipment, televisions, mobile phones, appliances, and batteries.
New Zealand lags many of our major trading partners in terms of e-waste legislation. For example the European Union has enacted the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) and the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS), many states in the United States have restrictions on e-waste, and Australia has the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme. At this stage New Zealand effectively has no e-waste disposal controls. There was however two commendable Government funded initiatives carried out in the past: the e-Day collections, and the TV takeback campaign. Unfortunately, these programmes no longer operate.
New Zealand ratified the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal in 1994, preventing the export of e-waste to certain countries. Prior to 2004, when the first application for the export of e-waste was made, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence pointed to it being exported illegally.
E-waste can be turned into e-scrap by recycling it. New Zealand has a small but growing e-scrap processing industry but there is a lack of data on its size.
Further information
- Gertsakis, John, Jonathon Hannon, John MacGibbon, Chris Nixon, Neelam Tripathi, Simon Wilkinson, and Laurence Zwimpfer. (2011) Ewaste in New Zealand, Five Years on. eDay : Ministry for the Environment, Waste Minimisation Fund
- Global E-waste Monitor – reports
- Circular Electronics Partnership
- Ecotech Services blog posts about e-waste
- Electronic waste at Wikipedia
- Electronic waste in New Zealand
- E-waste videos at Youtube
- Ever wonder what’s inside? – a slide presentation from The Restart Project
News articles on the web
Every year New Zealanders throw out 100 million kilos of old phones, laptops and batteries, which end up in landfill or are shipped overseas to recycling businesses that make money from our e-waste.
The Parties to the Basel Convention at their 15th meeting (COP15) held in Geneva agreed by consensus to the “Swiss-Ghana Amendments,” establishing new definitions of hazardous and non-hazardous electronic waste, and ensured that both of these two categories of e-waste will either be banned from trade or at a minimum require notification by the exporting country and consent by the importing country prior to export.
There are fresh calls for New Zealand to deal with its problematic e-waste and stop tonnes of potentially harmful rubbish ending up in our landfills every year.
The Story of Electronics employs the Story of Stuff style to explore the high-tech revolution’s collateral damage—25 million tons of e-waste and counting…