E-waste drop off point in Pretoria
September 15, 2008
Posted in Lifestyle
If you live in Pretoria and you have unwanted or broken electronic equipment that you want to get rid of, drop it off at the e-waste collection point at UNISA so that it can be recycled in an environmentally acceptable way.
Johnny Clegg told delegates at a recent Gartner conference that 460 000 PCs reach “end-of-life” every day and 550 million mobile phones reach “end-of-life” every year. That’s is a lot of unwanted gadgets. This electronic waste shouldn’t be thrown away with other rubbish because it could leach toxic chemicals. It also contains a number of valuable materials, such as copper and aluminium, that can be reclaimed. The plastic from PCs can also be recycled, and it is used to make new products such as benches and fence posts.
The e-waste drop-off point in Pretoria is at UNISA’s Muckleneuk Campus. There is a container marked E-WASTE at the back of the TvW building, 3rd floor service entrance below the parking north of TvW. (Entrance: c/n of Mears street and Willem Punt).
For more information contact the E-waste Association of South Africa
More than 3 tons of e-waste dropped off at Makro
September 8, 2008
Posted in Lifestyle
In little more than a month, 3.7 tons of electronic waste have been collected at the drop-off point set up by Makro and Fujitsu-Siemens at Makro’s Woodmead store, Greg Hart of Fujitsu-Siemens said on Talk Radio 702 today. The results have been so encouraging, he said, that the two companies are looking at rolling out the project nationwide soon, starting in Durban and Cape Town.
The e-waste is taken to Desco Electronic Recyclers for processing, said Hart. There the motherboards, for example, are ground down to fine powder and the different particles are extracted – such as plastics, which are recycled, and the various metals, which are sold off to be melted down and reused.
Desco will be audited to check that they dispose of hazardous material properly, said Hart.
Personal information on hard-drives is safe, said Hart. Desco gives a certificate to certify that they don’t access that information, he said, but, if you want to, you can take a hammer to your hard drive or drill a hole through it if you’re worried about security.
Your help wanted for e-waste survey
September 2, 2008
Posted in Lifestyle
The e-Waste Association of South Africa (eWASA) and the IT Association are conducting a survey about the kinds and amounts of (potential) e-waste in South African homes. They have put together an online questionnaire and ask if you could take 10 minutes to fill it out.
Click here for the questionnaire.
Please forward it to your friends and associates. They need as many submissions from South Africa as possible.
E-waste recycling hub opens at Makro
August 28, 2008
Posted in Business
Time to dig out the bits of old computer and broken cell phones you’ve had lying around your garage for years because Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Makro have opened an e-waste recycling hub where you can dispose of it all safely.
The pilot project is at Makro’s Woodmead store in Johannesburg and people can bring all their electronic waste – notebooks, PC’s, monitors, cell phones and calculators – irrespective of brand. The e-waste will be being stripped, recyclable elements recycled, and hazardous materials disposed of in an environmentally correct manner, say the companies.
“When one considers that about 240,000 notebooks and 120,000 PC’s are sold through the retail channel in South Africa annually, there is the potential for a great deal of e-waste posed by the devices and units that these are replacing. We see it as our responsibility to facilitate the disposal of as much as possible of this waste in an environmentally correct manner,” says Bruno Persic, consumer channel manager at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
Persic says the companies plan to roll out the project in all Makro stores nationwide in the coming months.
Source :: IT Online
E-waste: Johnny Clegg speaks out
August 21, 2008
Posted in Green News
Although e-waste only accounts for 2% to 3% of the content of landfill sites it contributes about 60% of the toxicity of those sites. This is according to African Sky’s Johnny Clegg who was speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town yesterday.
Well known for his musical career, Clegg said that there were many misconceptions about e-waste and its consequences. Among these, he said, was that companies would not be held liable for illegal dumping of old IT equipment. Clegg said that just because old IT equipment had been handed over to a “recycler”, companies were obliged to ensure that equipment was correctly and safely recycled. Read more
Researchers find safe way to deal with broken CFLs
July 2, 2008
Posted in Green News
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs are one of the easiest ways to reduce energy consumption, but there are concerns about their safety because of the small amounts of mercury (3 to 5 milligrams) CFLs contain. The mercury can be released as a vapour when the bulbs are broken. It can also reportedly escape from plastic bags containing discarded bulbs, which poses environmental problems with the disposal and storage.
Researchers at Brown University in the United States report that they have discovered a nanomaterial that can absorb the mercury emitted from a broken CFL. They have created a mercury-absorbent lining that can be used in CFL packaging. Read more
Wal-Mart’s green plan for its Chinese suppliers
April 9, 2008
Posted in Business
Thirty percent of the goods produced in China for export are apparently purchased by one US retail giant, Wal-Mart. And as part of moves by the mega-retailer to green up its supply chain, it plans to hold a meeting with about 1,000 Chinese producers to push them to reduce their environmental impact, Greenbiz.com reports. “The company plans to reduce the amount of packaging used by products by 5 percent by 2013 and created a packaging scorecard to help suppliers see where they can make improvements.” Read more on Greenbiz.com.
Via :: The Daily Green
Don’t forget to feed the worms
April 9, 2008
Posted in Green tips, Lifestyle
For all the eco-minded people in Johannesburg thinking of “semigrating” to Cape Town, here’s a little something to whet your apetite. Not only is the stately Mount Nelson hotel practising vermiculture, even little restaurants tucked away in shady Noordhoek are using worms to recycle their kitchen scraps. This wormery stands outside a restaurant in a little shopping centre near the start of Chapman’s Peak Drive. The headline on the information board reads: “Earthworms can teach us a thing or two about recycling!” Yup, so can Noordhoek’s restaurants. Even the one next door has its own wormery, so the waitress told me. What’s more, Cape Town’s corner shops sell Coca-Cola in those refundable 500ml glass bottles. I haven’t seen those in Joburg for years.
Space junk keeps falling on my head …
March 12, 2008
Posted in Green News
We humans are a messy bunch, not only has our rubbish turned into a problem in our cities, but tons of it is whizzing around above our heads in space. There are now 9,000 pieces of space junk, weighing more than 5,500 tonnes, orbiting the Earth, according to Nasa. They range from an astronaut’s glove lost in a 1965 space walk by Ed White, to solar panels, cameras, pliers, bits of exploded space craft and God know’s what else, reports Britain’s Observer newspaper. It’s amazing that to date only one person seems to have been injured by falling space debris – an Oklahoma woman who was hit on the shoulder by a piece of a rocket’s fuel tank.
Some of the junk is very high up, about 36,000km above the Earth’s surface, in what’s known as geostationary orbit, which is apparently where communications satellites are programmed to hover. There are reportedly about 200 dead satellites in this part of space at present. But other bits of space trash are just a few hundred kilometres above Earth in low Earth orbit. Space experts warn that this debris proses the most problems. A space shuttle had a near-miss with a piece of old satellite in 1991 and, in 2006, pieces of another satellite came very close to hitting a passenger plane, reports the Observer.
Space experts now say that the space debris has reached critical proportions and is a risk to future space missions. We really do need to clean up our act.
Via :: The Observer
UK may join crack down on free plastic bags
March 1, 2008
Posted in Green News
Britain looks like it’s about to join the list of country’s trying to restrict the use of plastic bags. The country’s prime minister wants retailers to start charging their customers for the plastic bags that they currently get for free in an attempt to cut back on the number of bags that end up in landfills or fouling up the environment. Britons use 13-million plastic bags a year, reports Reuters.
Australia wants to start phasing out the use of plastic bags in supermarkets by the end of this year and from June 1 shoppers in China will have to buy their bags. China also has banned the production of ultra-thin bags, and their use in supermarkets and shops will be forbidden from June 1. Reuters reports that up to 3 billion plastic bags a day are used in China. South Africa, Denmark, Germany and Ireland are among the countries where customers already have to pay for plastic bags.
The extent of the plastic problem was highlighted in a recent article in Britain’s Independent newspaper. Ninety percent of the rubbish floating in the oceans is believed to be plastic and the UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic, the newspaper report said. Worse still, in the Pacific Ocean, there is a giant trash vortex, which has been described as “almost like a plastic soup”, that covers an area “maybe twice the size of continental United States”. Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the 1990s, has warned that unless people cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew in the Pacific would double in size over the next decade.
Sources: Environment News Network and Independent
Picture: © Isabela Habur, iStockphoto.com
