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The $60 Billion Potential Hiding in Your Discarded Gadgets
Rich nations mine just a fraction of e-waste, leaving $60 billion a year in critical metals wasting away in boxes and drawers. But in West Africa, a dangerous recycling work is thriving.
Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate. If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which president-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term). He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it.
Or read this on Wired