There are plenty of ways of recycling unwanted mobile phones and other portable gadgets, but when it comes to ditching your old TV or computer, finding a viable recycling option can actually be nigh on impossible. And it looks like that may not change in the near future, despite attempts at creating a national e-waste recycling scheme.
Karen Dearne over at Australian IT tells us that the Total Environment Centre believes that the TV and computer recovery program is being jeopardised by the federal sustainability department by not looking at the big picture.
The centre said the paper changed the main goal of achieving an 80 per cent recycling rate over time, to simply “lifting collection-only rates” to 80 per cent. “It’s critical to understand that the collection rate is not synonymous with recycling. Actual recovery rates will be well below this level.”
Also unhappy with the plan are the companies involved, who believe that the scheme’s “voluntary” nature will open the door to cheap importers who will end up with a competitive advantage because they aren’t part of the program.
In any case, it looks like a universal recycling scheme for e-waste is still a way off for Australia, which is a shame given how much of it is already ending up in landfill.
[Australian IT via Lifehacker]
matt
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 4:51 PMmeh, just give them an official seal like the heart foundation tick, that they can put on their products to say its part of the program.
I say, make it mandatory… I would say don’t front load the cost, and just charge consumers for the recycling when they go and do it… but that would discourage people from doing it… even if it was illegal, people would still dump it…
would be good if it was like that though, because the greenest recycle job is one that isn’t done at all, charging at time of mandatory recycling would encourage people to do their own recycling, selling or gifting items on.
Dave
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 5:11 PMJust today i got rid of 30 odd tv’s (for a film project) and i got to tell you it was totally not an option to get these things recycled. It was about 15 dollars a tv to get them recycled which totally makes it impossible when you want to do the right thing but you just cant afford it. In the end some scrap metal guy came and picked them up for free but who knows where the bits they don’t use will end up? Also had to throw a few in the bin which i really didn’t want to do. There really needs to be something in place to make it easy to recycle otherwise people are going to keep throwing them out.
matt
Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 12:27 AM$15 seems reasonable… someones got to pull them apart and sort everything, its not an easy job…
I think yours is a bit of an extreme case… throwing out 30 tvs at once… thats a lot of waste!