OPINION> Commentary
|
OPINION> Commentary
|
|
Recycling in electronic age
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-13 07:41 We should not only know the importance of recycling the wastes, but also know how to recycle them green, says an article in People's Daily. The following is an excerpt: Recently, I attended a forum on how to recycle old electronic products in a green manner. "China E Action", an activity aimed at promoting the green reclaim of electronic products, was also launched at the forum. Multinationals like HP and local electronic appliance producers like Haier took the lead in the green recycle and planned to build more recycling stations for used electronic products or to encourage consumers to spontaneously recycle old electronic products by giving them coupons or mobile phone rechargeable cards. Recycling is not a new topic in the world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of "reduce, recycle, reuse" was quite popular among the advanced countries. In the past, the Chinese only addressed the problem of recycling wastes, but few had concerns about whether the type of recycle is green. In fact, improper recycling procedures may contaminate the environment for the second time, especially for electronic products such as mobile phones and computers. If these old products are discarded randomly or improperly, harmful elements such as lead, cadmium and mercury may enter air, soil and water and finally go back into the human bodies via the food chain. Now 3.3 billion people are using mobile phones in the world. In China, it is estimated that the number of wasted mobile phones would reach 200 million in 2008. So, with soaring numbers of electronic products, we can see it is quite pressing to cope with the problem of safe recycling. But it is not an easy job to safely recycle the wastes due to the absence of laws and regulations in this field. For one thing, although environmental protection is a practical issue, it seems still far away from our daily life. Individual acts may have little impact on the whole society, but the harms can be easily seen if every one of us ignores environmental protection. When laws and regulations are not in place, it is very necessary to train every one of us to have the idea of the green recycle. (China Daily 06/13/2008 page8) |
