Problems With Recycling Tech by ... Russian State Run Social Media?

From the extraction of metals and minerals, to processing, use, and destruction of technology, there are a lot of environmental and human rights concerns. Concerns around the full life cycle of consumer products has spurred a whole industry of corporate social responsibility and greenwashing. For Topic A of this committee, we are definitely more focused on the end of a product's lifecycle but this ties hand in hand with other climate change technologies.

Consider an iPhone.

At the end of its lifecycle, an iPhone still contains precious metals and circuitry. There are a lot of valuable products that would be great to recycle in technology. In fact, there's a whole Youtube video genre of people melting down electronic parts in their garages. Effective recycling would also mean that demand for raw metal would down. This would be amazing further up the supply chain as the mining of tungsten, tantalum, tin, and gold (known as the 3TGs) are often considered conflict minerals.

You can read more about what goes inside your devices here! It's a super interesting read but on the periphery of this committee.

So why don't we just recycle every smartphone that is now a brick? Cost. It's way too expensive to do at a scale that is financially viable. There are some facilities set up in Europe to handle this waste and separate out the parts but it is not necessarily at a scale that can handle the massive amount of technology waste we are creating.

A post recently on Russian State Run Instagram account, @get.waste.ed, highlighted this issue in regard to solar panels. This entire Instagram is a FASCINATING page on not only climate issues but also geopolitics. Did you catch how this Instagram is setting up the conversation around Russia's position on zero waste?

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