At present, electronic waste is becoming a big problem that plagues the world. Due to the rapid renewal of electronic products, the production of electronic waste is also faster. The United States is the world's largest producer of electronic products and electronic waste manufacturing countries, the annual production of electronic waste of 7 million tons to 8 million tons, and this number is becoming increasingly large, the next few years only to eliminate the old computer has about 300 million units. The entire European electronic waste is about 6 million tons. According to statistics, Germany produces 1.8 million tons of electronic waste each year, and France is 1.5 million tons.
And in the domestic, with the rapid development of China's high-tech industries and the rapid improvement of people's living standards, office, life in the use of computers, cell phones, printers and other electronic products have also surged at an alarming rate. According to statistics, in 1991, China's cell phone users only 1 million households, to 2001, more than 100 million households, to March 2004 reached 250 million households, is expected in 2008 will reach 500 million households. To an average of 3 years per cell phone, China will be scrapped every year, there are 70 million cell phones, plus cell phone accessories and batteries, resulting in about 400,000 tons of electronic waste. TV, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, computers, five major parts of the annual elimination of more than 20 million units, the growth rate of electronic waste is three times the rate of ordinary waste products.
Electronic waste improperly handled, the environmental pollution is very large. Environmentalists pointed out that waste electronic products and general municipal waste is very different, chassis plastic and circuit boards contain brominated flame retardants; monitors, picture tubes and printed circuit boards contain lead in the form of silicates; circuit boards on the solder for the lead-tin alloys; wires and packaging sets contain polyvinyl chloride and so on, these substances are harmful to the human body. If waste electronic products are buried in the soil without any treatment, the lead contained will seep out and pollute the soil. If these waste products are incinerated, a large amount of harmful gases will be released, polluting the air. If they are casually discarded into the wilderness or landfills, these heavy metals will flow into the groundwater causing pollution.
Guiyu Town in Shantou City is the largest collection and distribution center for electronic waste and used electrical appliances in Guangdong Province. Here, more than 100,000 civilian workers from impoverished areas handle more than a million tons of electronic waste each year. Due to the extremely primitive means of disposal, it has caused very serious environmental pollution while jeopardizing the health of the migrant workers. Sampling and testing of riverbank sediments show that the concentration of barium, a heavy metal that is seriously harmful to living organisms, is 10 times the dangerous threshold for soil pollution, tin is 152 times, chromium is 1,338 times, and lead is 212 times the standard for hazardous contamination, while the pollutants in the water exceed the standard for drinking water by thousands of times.
Waste appliances in Hohhot flow to second-hand appliance dealers
How waste appliances can be better dealt with has been troubling manufacturers, consumers and relevant government departments. It is understood that the waste appliances in Hohhot generally have such a few ways to deal with: to the big shopping malls in exchange for new, sold to the second-hand appliance dealers, sold to the waste recycling station. The second-hand home appliance dealer's sources are mainly from the various large home appliance shopping malls to recover, and then do the repair process. TCL manufacturers held a large-scale home appliance trade-in campaign some time ago, which stipulated that completely obsolete home appliances are not included in the scope of recycling. They said the recovered TVs were sold to second-hand appliance dealers.
Mr. Han of the waste recycling station also said, "Basically, every day from several big shopping malls in Hohhot to recover more than ten sets of refrigerators, Saturday and Sunday to recover more than usual." There are also some electronic components are some people in the south after the acquisition, and then processed into new products, but most of them belong to small workshops, product quality and become a problem.
At present, the "Waste Electrical and Electronic Products Recycling and Disposal Management Regulations"? Exposure draft has been submitted to the State Council Legislative Affairs Office, entered the review stage, this year is expected to be formally adopted and mandatory implementation of the "Regulations" stipulates that: the future producers of home appliances, distributors and after-sales service organizations, the obligation to recycle used home appliances, or else up to 100,000 yuan will be fined.
A person in charge of the National Home Appliances City said: "Recycling certainly requires costs, but now the serious price war so that the profit margins of home appliance manufacturers has been very small. And then the implementation of recycling, the burden on manufacturers is even heavier. If the recycling costs by the factory, business, consumer tripartite seems more feasible."
So, in Hohhot, the establishment of home appliance recycling treatment enterprises is feasible? A person in charge of the East Pigeon that: "This requires large sums of money, not tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands can be resolved, but also need to examine the time."
According to my understanding, so far, there is no home appliance association in Inner Mongolia.
The government needs to regulate the market for used appliances
What kind of problems are faced with the disposal of used appliances now?
The person in charge of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the Autonomous Region said: "Although there has been no clear and operable law on the recycling of used home appliances, there are many relevant departmental regulations, including the Development and Reform Commission, the Environmental Protection Bureau, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, the Ministry of Commerce and so on. These regulations have a lot of cross, overlap, conflict, making the management much less effective."
A professor at Inner Mongolia University's School of Environmental Management believes that "at present, our region's e-waste pollution prevention and control work is still in its infancy, so most of the waste electrical appliances are the same as the treatment of ordinary garbage, and ultimately be landfilled, the formation of serious pollution. If the use of recycling will bring another problem, a few companies will take this opportunity to disassemble the parts in the waste electrical appliances and reuse them to create a large number of 'new outside and old inside' electrical appliances, to the detriment of the interests of consumers."
Liu Fuzhong, vice president of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, said, "Exactly how to effectively deal with waste appliances is different for different places and different types of appliances." He said that the electronic waste recycling industry in the world only about five years of development, everything needs to be groped. But he personally feels that the most important thing that needs to be addressed now is that the government must regulate the market for the disposal of used appliances and not leave it alone because there is no suitable method. Domestic for how to carry out this recycling work seems to be a little "behind" in foreign countries. In a metropolis like Beijing, there is only one company licensed by the environmental protection department to formalize the treatment of used appliances.
Professional treatment of waste appliances can be very profitable
According to my understanding, the Japanese companies to waste appliances as a gold mine. Environmental experts revealed that after calculating the average per ton of computer parts containing 0.9 kg of gold, copper 128.7 kg, 270 kg of plastic, lead 58.5 kg, and a small amount of palladium, platinum and other precious metals. Waste electrical dismantling in the shell, parts, etc. After categorization, the plastic material part of the broken compression, into fine plastic particles sold to plastic products as raw materials for processing, the metal part of the appropriate refining, refining the purity of 99.99% of the gold can be achieved directly in the market for sale; iron, copper, etc. as scrap to send metal smelters back to the furnace to refining. As home appliance waste is rich in various metals, through professional refining equipment and environmental protection treatment, can earn high profits every year. 2003, Wuxi City, the construction of the first professional electronic waste treatment plant, each year can be "zero-pollution" treatment of 30,000 tons of electronic waste. In September this year, China will start construction of an electronic waste treatment plant in Tianjin, and will be officially put into use next year. This treatment center will become China's electronic waste treatment and recycling base in North China, the annual comprehensive utilization of electronic waste 30,000 tons. After the completion of the project, the center will extract gold, silver, palladium and other precious metals, while zinc, iron, copper and other metals can be extracted, and the circuit boards are crushed and reused.