The burning issue of e-waste
Electronic waste threatens the environment and public health. Refurbishment programs can help.
by Etelka Lehoczky
13 Jan 2025The smoke is black and poisonous. Palestinians in the West Bank, desperate to eke out a meager living, collect discarded electronic equipment — computers, TVs, printers, cables — and burn it to extract trace amounts of valuable metals. The resulting smoke is full of toxic chemicals that infiltrate the soil, the water, and people’s bodies.
“People do it just to have a couple hundred shekels worth of copper, lead, whatever they can claim,” says Akram Amro, founder of the nonprofit Green Land Society for Health Development in the West Bank city of Hebron. “It’s an opportunity and a problem at the same time.”
Noxious plumes of smoke, like those in the West Bank, can be found in poor communities across the globe. As the world becomes more dependent on laptops, tablets, and smartphones — and as people continually upgrade to new devices — the need to find ways to repurpose or safely recycle old electronics, or e-waste, has become urgent.
Amro and his organization have studied the environmental and health impacts in villages near burn sites. They’ve found high concentrations of lead and chromium in the springs that people had relied on for water. “Now people can’t use the water from those wells, because it’s black and contaminated,” says Amro, an associate professor of physiotherapy at Al-Quds University. “And we found evidence of contamination in the blood of people working and living in those areas.”
Before the vast Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, was demolished, teenagers burn cables from computers and other electronic devices to recover valuable copper.
Image credit: Olivier Asselin/Alamy Stock Photo
Before the vast Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, was demolished, teenagers burn cables from computers and other electronic devices to recover valuable copper.
If that weren’t bad enough, Amro also found it particularly grim that toxic smoke from old electronics from Israel was affecting Palestinian villages where many schools don’t have computers for students. He recruited a Rotary club in Jerusalem and one in the United States to help create a program to refurbish old computers for schools and hopefully divert at least some from ending up in burn sites.
The $13,000 pilot project, funded by a district grant and donations from multiple clubs, hired local workers to wipe disk drives and upgrade necessary components. In this way, the initiative addressed another problem in the community: It provided a few good jobs, says Merrill Glustrom, a member of the Rotary Club of Boulder, Colorado. “They’re refurbishing computers, which could lead to programming computers or doing refurbishing elsewhere,” says Glustrom, whose club has partnered with similar electronics recycling ventures in Colorado. “There’s lots of possibilities for them besides dead-end jobs.”
Toxic metals and greenhouse gases
A record 137 billion pounds of e-waste was generated around the globe in 2022, but only about a quarter was formally collected and recycled in an environmentally sound way, according to a report from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and other organizations. Most of the remainder was burned, dumped, or recycled unsafely, leeching dangerous substances into the environment and generating high levels of greenhouse gases. Researchers estimate that waste from devices such as computers, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs was responsible for 580 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted in 2020 alone.
“You have a range of heavy metals in there — lead, cadmium, and others that are toxic — and you frequently find those in groundwater close to waste sites,” says Sara Brosché, a science adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network. “You also have toxic chemicals in the plastics in e-waste. Flame retardants, for example, are very common.”
By the numbers
But there is an alternative. As in Hebron, Rotary clubs around the world are repairing and updating used electronic devices and donating them to people who need them. In Australia, members of the Rotary Club of Chadstone/East Malvern collect devices, refurbish them, and donate them to nonprofit organizations in the area. In Taiwan, members of the Rotary clubs of Ping-Tung Feng-Huang and Kaohsiung secured a Rotary Foundation global grant to fund a refurbishment program at a local junior high school. Like the Hebron program, it donates the computers to schools in needy areas. The initiative is on track to donate 100 computers by next June and 80-100 computers every year after that, says Fu-Chuan Shih, a member of the Kaohsiung club.
With guidance, the students fix up the old machines themselves. “We let the students personally disassemble the computers, clean them internally, reinstall and test the software, reassemble them, and carry out the final sorting and packaging,” Shih says. “In addition to allowing students to make a practical contribution to environmental protection, it is hoped that their demand for information equipment will no longer be just a blind pursuit of speed and efficiency but also reflect a concern for the environment.”
In Italy, members of the Rotaract Club of Milano Sforza are four years into a grant-funded refurbishing program launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the COVID period, a lot of young people needed computers and other devices in order to [join online classes] and do their homework,” says Gianluca Cocca, the club’s service projects chair. “I have a technical background, so I said, ‘OK, let’s do it. We’ll start a whole new service.’”
Cocca had to teach his fellow members how to refurbish the machines they collected, but now more than 100 people contribute to the project. The club members clean the computers inside and out and upgrade some components, such as hard drives, that are too old to keep up with current computing demands. They then donate the equipment to nonprofit organizations in the area.
The only problem? Fewer and fewer devices can be refurbished. “A computer made 10 years ago is totally perfect once it’s regenerated with good software and some upgrade of the hardware. It’s fine for Zoom meetings, things like that,” Cocca says. “But updating a smartphone is really difficult. We can do nothing with the hardware.”
Eco-friendly electronics
That’s because the phones — and increasingly tablets and laptops — aren’t designed to be upgraded when their technology starts to lag. Often, smartphone repairs are very difficult or impossible because you can’t remove and replace components without damaging other parts of the device. Manufacturers want to force people to buy new equipment regularly, says Brandon Smith, a member of the Rotary Club of Wenatchee Confluence in Washington and the owner of an IT consulting company. “It’s planned obsolescence. Manufacturers do stuff like using industrial adhesive on the glass on the back of a phone. When that breaks, you have to chip it out one piece at a time,” says Smith, whose club led a computer recycling event on Earth Day last year.
Image credit: Olivier Asselin/Alamy Stock Photo
There are exceptions among manufacturers, though, at least where computers are concerned. Smith recommends that ecologically minded consumers buy from companies that design their machines to be repairable and upgradable. However, he adds, not many manufacturers do this. One is called Framework. “Framework built [its] platform to be fully upgradable, no matter what,” he says. “You can change out the keyboard. You can change out the trackpad. You can change out the ports. You can change out the screen. It’s pretty cool.”
There’s no real cure for the e-waste problem, experts like Brosché say, except to make the whole life cycle of consumer electronics more eco-friendly. Unfortunately, the very existence of the problem comes as a surprise to many. Glustrom remembers how shocked he was when Amro told his club about the computers burned in the West Bank. Though Glustrom is proud of what their pilot project accomplished, he acknowledges that such efforts are just a small part of what needs to be a much more comprehensive movement.
“We have a throwaway society. That’s our consciousness. And we need to somehow get to a more circular economy,” Glustrom says. “But we’re running out of space and time in our environment, and we just can’t live this way any longer. We’ve got to make a switch.”
This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.