Recycling electronic components, known as e-Recycling, can reduce the carbon footprint of a business and keep thousands of tons of toxic materials out of landfills globally. The recycling of electronic components demonstrates environmental responsibility because it reduces the amount of energy needed to create new electronics, recovers precious valuable resources, and prevents heavy metals and other toxins from contaminating the soil, water, and air. Electronic recycling ensures that data is properly destroyed, materials are appropriately recovered and reused, and businesses have a paper trail to document the proper disposal of their assets.
Every year, more than 2 million tons of electronic waste is generated in the United States alone in the form of discarded computers, cell phones, laptops, and televisions. Recycling programs were created in the 1990s to deal with this rising waste stream, but not all businesses have seen fit to go the route of e-recycling. Instead, they place it in the solid waste stream where it is either incinerated or placed in a landfill. Some even sell it on the gray market to third-world countries who then stockpile it until the valuable metals can be recovered under less-than-ideal conditions, exposing workers and the environment to contaminants.
Electronics contain a variety of materials that can be recovered and reused if they have been properly placed in the e-recycling stream. Even those materials that cannot be reused can be segregated for safe disposal to keep them from harming the environment. Metals such as gold, copper, palladium, silver, platinum, and aluminum, heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and arsenic, and other materials including glass, plastic, and petroleum products exist in various degrees in electronic components, and all of them can be recovered and sold on the open market or safely discarded.
The energy savings from e-recycling are staggering. To generate a ton of copper, for example, 200 tons of copper ore must be mined and smelted, or 14 tons of e-waste must be recovered and recycled. The numbers are even more impressive for gold, which requires 200,000 tons of gold ore or 70,000 tons of recycled components to produce one ton. Not only can this help a business substantially reduce its carbon footprint, it also helps keep the commodity price down because of the lower production costs of recycling versus mining.
To take advantage of the e-recycling program for servers, storage devices, and accessories, customers need only contact NEI. NEI will provide the information needed to ship the components, as well as a final certificate of destruction if needed.
Contact NEI online or by calling (877) 792-9099 to learn more.