Tag: technology

How China Uses Tech to Sort Its Waste

An app to do it all: Baidu Recycle

What if recycling e-waste could actually be as easy as clicking a few buttons? That’s what China has achieved with their Baidu Recycle app (Baidu Huishou Zhan, lit. “Baidu Recycling Station”).

The Baidu Recycle opening press conference (Baidu, 2015).

In response to the growing challenge of e-waste pollution, UNDP China collaborated with internet company Baidu to develop a smartphone application known as “Baidu Recycle” (UNDP, n.d.).

The app helps users price and recycle their unwanted electronic products by generating nearby e-waste pick-up services. It was introduced in hopes that it would streamline the recycling process, making it more convenient and hassle-free. In doing so, this would also reduce the number of informal recycling stations.

User guide to the Baidu Recycle application (UNDP, n.d). 

The Baidu Recycle app is an example of how technology can be harnessed to simplify the e-waste recycling process for everyday consumers. One of the major barriers to recycling was identified to be consumers’ lack of knowledge regarding their disposal options (Islam et al., 2021). Apps like Baidu Recycle thus ensure that the recycling process runs smoothly, taking care of everything up to your doorstep.

China is not the only one that offers apps like Baidu Recycle. Similar apps can be found in other pockets of the world, such as MyGizmo in Cincinnati or RESQ in Singapore (Hicks, 2010). However, they have yet to take off thus far. Personally, I didn’t know that RESQ existed in Singapore prior to writing this post. Though these apps are amazing inventions, they can only truly be useful if a high proportion of the population actually utilises them to dispose of their e-waste. Perhaps marketing tactics, such as offering incentives for new users, would help such apps gain popularity where they are located. This has proved successful for other apps such as Healthy 365 under the Live Healthy SG programme, which offered free Fitbit Inspire HR health trackers to users who signed up for their programme.

References

Baidu. (2015). Baidu Recycle. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://gongyi.baidu.com/dist/action-recycle.html.

Hicks, R. (2010). Could this app ease Singapore’s e-waste problem? Eco-Business. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://www.eco-business.com/news/could-this-app-ease-singapores-e-waste-problem/.

Islam, M. T., Huda, N., Baumber, A., Shumon, R., Zaman, A., Ali, F., Hossain, R., & Sahajwalla, V. (2021). A global review of consumer behavior towards e-waste and implications for the circular economy. Journal of Cleaner Production, 316, 128297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128297.

UNDP. (n.d.). Baidu Recycle. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://www.cn.undp.org/content/china/en/home/ourwork/our_campaigns/e-waste.html.

UNDP. (2016). China’s e-waste recycling app goes global. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://www.asia-pacific.undp.org/content/rbap/en/home/presscenter/pressreleases/2016/06/02/china-s-e-waste-recycling-app-goes-global-.html.

Urban Mining

Extracting gold from your mobile phone: Urban mining

Urban mining is a new approach to recycling, referring to the process of recovering metals from e-waste (Arya et al. 2021). This is a technique introduced recently to address the global e-waste challenge, as part of the push towards a more sustainable life cycle of electronic products. You could think of it as somewhat similar to the idea of renewable energy—it’s all about the recycling of what we already have, rather than generation from scratch.

Urban mining is an alternative to virgin mining, the more traditional method to extracting precious metals. Virgin mining is comparatively undesirable, having resulted in catastrophic environmental disasters in the past such as mine explosion events and poisoning events. Virgin mining has also been proven to be an unsustainable option for our future, according to Murthy & Ramakrishna (2021). On the other hand, urban mining is cheaper in cost and just as viable for extracting precious metals.

Olympic athletes show off small electronic devices donated by people from all over Japan, instead of their shiny medals (International Olympic Committee, 2021).

Have an extra old Nokia lying around that you don’t use anymore? It could be more valuable than you think. Between April 2017 and March 2019, people from all over Japan donated over six million mobile phones to the organisers of Tokyo 2020 (Smedley, 2020). From the devices collected, precious metals were extracted and used to make 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals for the Games (International Olympic Committee, 2021).

It’s amazing how the Tokyo Olympics were able to garner so much support for their urban mining scheme. Locally, urban mining has yet to gain much traction in Singapore. Seeing the comparative advantages that urban mining offers over virgin mining, we should continue to explore how urban mining could be adopted and promoted outside large-scale events like the Olympics.

References

Arya, S., Patel, A., Kumar, S., & Pau-Loke, S. (2021). Urban mining of obsolete computers by manual dismantling and waste printed circuit boards by chemical leaching and toxicity assessment of its waste residues. Environmental Pollution (1987), 283, 117033-117033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2021.117033.

International Olympic Committee. (2021). Tokyo 2020 highlights the possibilities for a circular economy. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://olympics.com/ioc/news/tokyo-2020-highlights-the-possibilities-for-a-circular-economy.

Murthy, V., & Ramakrishna, S. (2022). A review on global E-waste management: Urban mining towards a sustainable future and circular economy. Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland), 14(2), 647. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020647.

Smedley, T. (2020). How to mine precious metals in your home. Retrieved 1 April 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200407-urban-mining-how-your-home-may-be-a-gold-mine.

Developing Biodegradable Electronic Products

The new wave of technology

As discussed in a previous post, one response to increased producer responsibility is the development of new technologies to make electronic products more sustainable by design. With this has come a new wave of technology, and the emergence of biodegradable products as a more viable and sustainable future for the electronics industry.

New materials have been created in the push to invent more biodegradable electronic products (DeWeerdt, 2017).

A group of scientists from Stanford University managed to create a new semiconductive polymer which can decompose upon contact to weak acid (Lei et al., 2017). By using this material to make electronic devices, such devices can completely disintegrate within a month when treated with mild acid. The acid required is also so mild that the natural environment alone could probably provide appropriate conditions to break down the polymer, according to the researchers.

This is the future of electronic devices. With such advancements in research and technology, biodegradable electronic products will become more and more viable, allowing for non-biodegradable products to be gradually phased out. Hopefully, this will reduce the amount of e-waste generated, if electronic devices themselves become absorbable into the natural environment.

References

DeWeerdt, S. (2017). Totally biodegradable electronics could help solve e-waste problem. Anthropocene. Retrieved 27 March 2022, from https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/05/totally-biodegradable-electronics-could-help-solve-e-waste-problem/.

Lei, T., Guan, M., Liu, J., Lin, H., Pfattner, R., Shaw, L., McGuire, A. F., Huang, T., Shao, L., Cheng, K., Tok, J. B. -., & Bao, Z. (2017). Biocompatible and totally disintegrable semiconducting polymer for ultrathin and ultralightweight transient electronics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS, 114(20), 5107-5112. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701478114.