Recyclopedia

E-waste is the largest source of lead in solid waste.

It is estimated that 70% of heavy metals in landfills comes from e-waste.

E-waste can contain more than 1,000 components, many of which are toxic, including brominated flame retardants, PVC, gases, heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium), and more.

Greater than 85% of all e-waste goes unrecycled.

It’s energy efficient to rebuild old computers, but only about 2% of PCs ever find their way to a second user.

About 50 millions cell phones are replaced worldwide a month, and only 10% are recycled. If we recycled just a million cell phones, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking 1,368 cars off the road for a year.

All new steel products contain a minimum of 25% recycled content.

Every ton of steel recycled makes the following savings - 40% of the Water required in production, 75% of the Energy needed to make steel from virgin material, 1.28 tons of Solid Waste, Reduction of Air emissions by 86%, Reduction of Water pollution by 76%.

The energy saved by the steel industry through the use of recycled materials saves enough energy to power 18 million homes for a year.

Using scrap aluminum to make new cans consumes 95% less energy than making them from raw bauxite ore.

Recycling one ton of aluminum cans saves the equivalent of 1,665 gallons of gasoline.

Aluminum can be recycled infinitely without losing quality and the value it provides generally covers the cost required to collect and recycle it.

Every ton of Aluminium recycled makes the following savings - 6 tons of Bauxite, 4 tons of Chemical Product and 14MWh of Electricity.

Large amounts of e-waste have been sent to countries such as China, India and Kenya, where lower environmental standards and working conditions make processing e-waste more profitable. Around 80 % of the e-waste in the U.S. is exported to Asia.

Guiyu in China is the largest e-waste site on earth with an estimated 150,000 e-waste workers. The average workday is 16 hours and the workers make about $1.50 per day by recovering valuable metals and parts from the waste.