Global giants such as Amazon and Apple should be made responsible for helping to collect, recycle and repair their products to cut the 155,000 tonnes of electronic waste being thrown away each year in the UK, MPs say. From a report: An investigation by the environmental audit committee found the UK is lagging behind other countries and failing to create a…
Tag: e-waste
Many Amazon Returns Are Just Destroyed or Sent to Landfills
What happens when we return items to Amazon? “Perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload — and even destroyed or sent to landfill,” according to Marketplace, an investigative consumer program on Canada’s public TV:
Experts say hundreds of thousands of returns don’t end up back on the e-commerce giant’s website for resale, as customers might think. Marketplace journalists posing as…
Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash
“Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives — and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that,” reports Wired. (Alternate URL…
World’s Pile of Electronic Waste Grows Ever Higher: Study
The world’s mountain of discarded flat-screen TVs, cellphones and other electronic goods grew to a record high last year, according to an annual report released Thursday. New submitter Splyncryth writes: The U.N.-backed study estimated the amount of e-waste that piled up globally in 2019 at 53.6 million metric tonnes (59.1 million tons) – almost 2 million metric tons more than the…
The Fairphone 3 Packs in Features While Keeping Its Green Credentials
Fairphone, the company that wants to get ethically-responsible smartphones into the hands of consumers worldwide, has unveiled the third iteration of its modular device. From a report: Fairphone 3, launched under the tagline, “The phone that dares to be fair,” is available for pre-order now, and boasts some pretty decent specs that put it on par with more well-established devices. The…
ICE Raid on Samsung Repair Contractor Shows Big Tech’s Reliance on Exploitative Labor
CVE Technology Group, a Texas-based electronics repair company that was the target of the largest workplace raid by the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in a decade, is a major subcontractor of Samsung, the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. The relationship between CVE and Samsung is so close that, for years, Samsung engineers were… Continue reading ICE Raid on Samsung Repair Contractor Shows Big Tech’s Reliance on Exploitative Labor