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Research Report on China’s E-waste Disposal Industry

Wednesday, December 12, 2012 13:11
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The market research reports on environment provide comprehensive information on environmental services. The environment reports provide insights into product and market trends, analyses, opportunities, projections, sales, and marketing strategies.

With the rapid development of information technology and the accelerated update and upgrade of electronic products, the elimination and recycling of electronic products become a problem of the world currently. At present, various e-wastes have become one of the solid wastes with a fast growth rate. For example, scrapped appliances such as computers, household appliances, and communication equipment as well as various waste materials and wastages generated in the manufacturing process of these appliances occupy enormous resources. Improper disposal of these e-wastes will cause tremendous pollution to the environment.

With the rapid development of economy, China’s e-wastes generate at an astonishing speed in recent years. In 2010, China became the second largest producing country of e-wastes worldwide, generating 2.3 million tons of e-wastes, only second to 3 million tons of the United States. In addition, large numbers of e-wastes are illegally or legally exported to China annually.

In the recycling and comprehensive utilization processes of e-wastes, phenomena of polluting the environment and damaging human health exist to varying degrees. In developed countries, e-waste disposal is a mature industry, with specialized agencies and equipment conducting harmless disposal to various e-wastes. However, China’s e-waste disposal industry is not yet mature currently. Driven by interests, e-waste recycling processing with extremely severe pollution is formed in many places of China. For example, there are considerable illegal manual workshops in many places of China. They organize workers to disassemble e-wastes into small parts, refining various metals. For example, they extract gold, copper, etc. by burning e-wastes; carrying out the separation of various types of components and materials by heating and other methods. Enormous toxic gases and wastages released in these processes, which not only pollute the atmosphere and rivers, but also tremendously threaten the health of workers and residents nearby.

E-waste is a special renewable resource. Although the pollution is enormous, it is also of relatively high recycling value. For instance, the metal content in computers exceeds 30%, and that in waste printed circuit boards is more considerable. In waste circuit boards, the copper content is up to 20%, which also contain metals such as aluminum and iron as well as trance amounts of rare and noble metals such as gold, silver and platinum. The plastic content in e-wastes is also very high. After melting, plastic can be used as the raw material of new products or as fuel.

China is a major producing and consuming country of electrical and electronic products. There are hundreds of millions of electrical and electronic products such as TV sets, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and computers produced annually. In 2011, the output of China’s TV sets, refrigerators and home freezers, washing machines, air conditioners, and computers separately was 120 million, 105 million, 66.71 million, 130 million, and 320 million sets.

According to incomplete statistics, the total recycling value of resource recycling industries in major developed countries worldwide is over USD 200 billion annually.

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