Have you ever wondered what happened to your old electronic devices? I mean your Nokia N91, your old home desktop and those landlines you never used. Have you ever wondered what happens to all of fake electronic gadgets that just hang in electronic shops and are never bought? Chances are nothing happened to them. They were just dumped somewhere
Ordinarily this may not have constituted more of a serious problem than enviromental pollution, but with electronic waste, there are over 1,000 different chemical substances hazardous to human health many of which are moderately and highly toxic.
DID YOU ALSO KNOW THAT…
In February 2010, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) released a report detailing the effect of electronic waste and pollution. Using Data from 11 countries to analyze and predict current and future e-waste generation patterns. The Report predicted a rise in e-waste generation by 40 million tons per year. Between 2003 and 2008 amount of electronic devices produced went from 90 million to 152 million in the United States alone. All these before tablets stormed the market and smart phones became closer than our clothes .
Eventually all these devises are discarded either just thrown away or given to recycling shops without a second thought. Ironically the bulk of all these end up on our shores as “fairly used” or “second hand” and compound our e-waste problem with a mixture of unused devices and fairly used.
According to Christine Terada in her report, Recycling Electronic Wastes in Nigeria: Putting Environmental and Human Rights at Risk, (2012). It is estimated that about 500 containers which container at least 500 personal computers each arrive Lagos from Europe each month and over 370 of them are pure junk. The chemicals in these products can be contacted as easily as through inhalation.
About 45% of e-waste in Nigeria is shipped from America. About one-third of the contents of these containers are bad beyond use and some beyond repair. All these also are simply dumped all across Lagos. Infact one warehouse handles about 40 container loads alone each month.
The Nigerian Ministry of Environment, has reported that e-waste components such as lead have been recovered right out of ordinary people’s backyards. This can lead to huge possibilities of lead poisoning. This is not even taking consideration of the amount of contaminated drinking water.
Sadly, there are little or no e-waste recycling facilities, which has given law enforcement agencies like Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON) and Computer professionals, registration council of Nigeria a very big headache.
That is why we at SuperGeeks, in our true super hero fashion, have set up our own little recycling process, starting from our Gadget Swap scheme. We seek to create a cleaner and safer environment, free from e-waste and all that tech clutter.
With Gadget Swap, you simply bring in your old and unwanted gadgets, all those phones you don’t know what to do with or are tired of fixing and we will give you money off vouchers (up to a whopping 50%) so you can get a brand new one from our retail partners. This way, you become a super hero like us, saving the world from villainous waste, one phone and one computer at a time.
We are Super Geeks, if ever there is a tech problem we can’t fix, no one else can.
