Synergizing industrialized and developing countries to improve resource recovery for e-waste: case study Belgium - Kenya

Abstract

Due to high labor costs, e-waste recycling companies in industrialized countries increasingly adopt destructive mechanical pre-processing based treatments. These processes perform poorly for precious metals and plastics due to material incompatibility and increased entropy, resulting in low effective recycling efficiencies for these material categories. In developing countries most e-waste treatments consist of manual dismantling, followed by primitive refining techniques, which is not only inefficient, but also poses a serious threat to the environment. This article assesses, from an economic and environmental perspective, a cooperation scenario between Belgium and Kenya in which manual dismantling and state of the art metal refining techniques for recycling computers are combined. Findings show that international cooperation could offer a more sustainable solution, yet measures must be taken to avoid the “cherry picking” of valuable components and environmentally unsound disposal of the remaining parts.