Name: Can we avoid drowning in a sea of e-waste? | Rethink Sustainability
Uploaded: 2020-03-22T18:51:47.000Z
Duration: 2 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The second conditional

INTERVIEWER: If you had to come up with a snappy headline

Adverbs of manner

We are drowning in a sea of e-waste, and that problem is only going to get bigger and bigger.

We are producing 50 million tonnes of e-waste every year and that could double by 2050.

I don't want to carry this around everywhere.

Give that a couple of years I’ll want another one.

There's 60 different chemicals and metals in, you know, your standard electronic devices.

The UK government estimates that 90 per cent of it ends up in landfill.

More than a hundred countries have a GDP that’s smaller than the value that can be extracted

from e-waste, according to the United Nations.

Extracting all those chemicals and metals obviously is an industry in itself.

There’s one recycling company in China that is producing more cobalt out of old devices

Some fashion houses, for instance, are now marketing themselves as only using gold for

I think I preferred the mobile phone myself.

There’s also a healthy second-hand market in the components themselves.

Of the office computers that get sold and carted away by professional companies, between

75 and 90 per cent of them get refurbished, sold on eBay.

The irony there is that the old-fashioned computer, the desktop, is actually a lot more

valuable for people retooling these things and reselling them.

They’re generally more powerful and they last a lot longer.

Laptops are a lot harder to resell because they're less durable and they wear out a lot

On a global basis, recycling and reselling all those old computers and phones, it sounds

great, but on an individual level, you know, getting rid of old kit is not that easy.

Have you ever tried to actually sell or get rid of an old DVD player?

The UN has set a target for 30 per cent of e-waste to be recycled by 2023, so that's

More than 60 countries have already enacted legislation to deal with e-waste.

We used to buy thousands of CDs and DVDs.

Now we're listening to Spotify and watching Netflix.

That in a way reduces the amount of hard waste and e-waste.

The thing that will have the most impact, as we're seeing in the consumer market, is

If they demand better designs, more durable designs, things that will last longer and

don't succumb to just upgrading constantly, that could potentially have a huge impact

on reducing the amount of e-waste out there.