Each season brings a new crop of gadgets marketers are hollering for us to buy. Moreover, every upgrade tempts us to throw the old version in the bin. Consequently, we have a growing mountain of old gadgets our throwaway-society no longer wants. Manufacturers don’t seem to want to know about the problems this is causing for the device recycling industry.
Call for Manufacturers to Make Device Recycling Easier
The device recycling industry has two problems with gadgets running on lithium-ion batteries. Their first problem is the materials are inherently unstable, and have enough energy to start a fire even when they appear to be discharged.
Geoffrey Fowler wrote a piece for Washington Post that had us wondering. “Around the world, garbage trucks and recycling centers are going up in flames,” he says. This is due to batteries becoming increasingly powerful, but also more difficult to take apart. These devices are becoming thinner too, and to make matters worse, manufacturers glue everything together and hide the batteries away.
Hear What Isauro Flores-Hernandez Has to Say
Isauro Flores-Hernandez makes a living from dismantling gadgets at a device recycling plant in Wisconsin. He keeps thick gloves, metal tongs and a red fireproof bin at his workstation, because he needs to whip away a gadget the moment it ignites.
The problem is getting tougher because of all the gadgets we never had a decade ago. Geoffrey Fowler lists ear buds, e-cigarettes, hoverboards, laptops, power tools, smartphones, tablets, toys, and scooters all containing lithium ion batteries. Isauro Flores-Hernandez’ boss Neil Peters-Michaud says, “I just don’t understand why manufacturers don’t include practical design features.
“That’s innovations that their users and the reuse-and-recycling community can benefit from to extend the life of their products safely.” Because we face a problem of device recycling becoming uneconomic because labor and time are money, he explains. Moreover, if these plants start closing, then who will do the work?
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Preview Image: Device Batteries for Recycling
