Your drawer full of old tech could have a new life -- or start a fire. Here's how to handle it.
If your home is anything like mine, there’s a forlorn drawer somewhere that’s full of old batteries, zip-ties, cables and gadgets you haven’t touched in years.
That stuff might look like junk, but don’t be fooled: Some of it is potential e-waste, and the last thing you should do is toss it in the trash.
Many of your old phones and tablets are packed with components containing rare metals that are difficult to find and pull out of the ground. Once those components wind up in the landfill, there’s no easy way to recover them, so the limited supply we already have shrinks even further. Other kinds of e-waste, such as rechargeable batteries, often contain chemicals that could pose problems for the environment or human health, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And gadgets that contain nonremovable batteries could start a fire if they, say, get crushed in a compactor.
The world generated 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste — comprising laptops, smartphones, electric toothbrushes, air conditioners and much more — in 2019, according to the Global E-Waste Statistics Partnership, an organization founded by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations University and others to track the growth of the problem. Less than a quarter of those castoff products were verifiably recycled. The rest, the report says, likely wound up being tossed into the trash or “exported as secondhand products or e-waste” to countries so they can decide on how to deal with it.
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