The significance of the life cycle environmental aspect of used electronic equipment is becoming an important issue. Poor management of end-of-life electronic equipment is one of the factors that contribute to environmental pollution. In many countries, used electronic equipment is either dumped into municipal landfills or mixed with household trash and incinerated at waste incineration plants. These methods are environmentally unsound and do not conserve natural resources. When electronic equipment is dumped in landfills with other ordinary waste, toxic hazards like impurities such as lead, mercury, and cadmium can accumulate in the groundwater, poisoning future generations. Burning these electronic wastes can also pollute the environment and pose a threat to human health.
As technology evolves, it accelerates the obsolescence of existing products. People become less satisfied with their existing products and oftentimes discard them before they reach the end of their notional life. The Information Technology (IT) equipment industry is no exception. This new economy is leading to an increase in the use of electronic equipment, which in turn generates large quantities of electronic waste. The current economic situation of the IT sector is causing many companies to re-evaluate their IT usage. Such a revaluation can lead to consolidation in the industry and an upgrade, which results in a surplus of used equipment.
Significance of IT Equipment Recycling and Disposal
The most significant environmental impact of IT products is seen in the networking equipment disposal in Singapore, where large quantities of hazardous waste are likely to be produced. The disposal of electrical and electronic equipment that contains hazardous and toxic materials requires more control than other industrial or electrical equipment and cannot be treated in landfills combined with ordinary waste. The local landfill capacity determines the short-term and long-term environmental effects, and any toxic materials landfilled during equipment’s products may accumulate on-site where the product is disposed of, which in the long run will affect subsurface injections and environmental concentrations for future monitoring. This is particularly important in an island state, such as Singapore, where landfill space is so rare.
The life of the IT equipment consists of several stages starting from the raw materials extraction to manufacture, transportation, and product usage phase, and finally disposal in the post-consumption phase. In this life cycle, large amounts of emissions are produced, and the accumulation of materials in the waste stream can cause significant depletion of natural resources and generate problems such as air and soil pollution.
Not only that, many metals such as copper, tin, or lead contained in electronic waste are not only valuable secondary resources that can be recovered, but they can also help to significantly save raw materials for electronics production. In order to protect the environment, countries are taking positive steps in legislating to ensure that electronic waste is in an environmentally sound state, both during production and during disposal. The ‘take-back’ regulations involve producers/shareholders in the financing of reuse, recycling, or disposal, and many manufacturers design through the elimination/identification of hazardous substances so the product can be safely and easily recycled.
Adverse effects on human health have been identified in these electronic waste streams containing hazardous and toxic materials such as cathode ray tubes, glass panels, circuit boards, batteries, fluorescent lamps, and PC monitors. Landfill treatments for these materials are costly and require special procedures, but in most cases, they are treated as ordinary household waste. Thus, they are not only harmful to the working environment but also to the environment as a whole.
In land-scarce and highly urbanized Singapore, the sustainable management of resources is of utmost importance. As the production and consumption of IT equipment rise, there will inevitably be a corresponding increase in its waste stream. Additionally, shorter PC lifecycles, rapid advances in technology, and legislative and regulatory pressure are together driving the need for economic and environmentally sound solutions.
Regulations and Policies
Introduced by the National Environmental Agency (NEA) on 19 October 2018, the new system aims to encourage EEE producers to consider the impact of EEE on the e-waste landscape. It delivers industry stakeholders a psychological signal that the material value of collected e-waste should be maintained and minimizes the problems associated with operating substandard collection and recycling services in the long run. The NEPR requires either an EEE producer to form a collective agreement under the NEPR or to comply with the minimum requirements needed to ensure that proper collection, treatment, recovery, and recycling technologies are all in place and functioning properly to handle the specific categories of prescribed EEE. The prescribed EEE refers to the EEE described in the third Schedule of the regulation. The electrical and electronic products such as electrical appliances, IT and communications products, toys, and sports equipment, to name a few, fall under the responsibility of the respective producer of the prescribed electrical and electronic products to ensure reliable collection and treatment of their products that have reached end-of-life. The new NEPR regulation aims at keeping control over increasing EEE. It marks the beginning of controlling e-waste recycling and disposal in Singapore.
The New and Expanding Producer Responsibility (NEPR) Scheme is a revised regulation under the Environmental Public Health Act (EPHA). The new and/or expanding EEE producers are required to set up a Producer Responsibility System (PRS) to provide collection, proper treatment, and recycling technologies for the end-of-life products that they bring into the Singapore market.
Technological advancement and consumption patterns have led to the proliferation of electronic and electrical equipment (EEE). Volatile and hazardous substances contained in EEE can release harmful substances into the environment, causing adverse effects on human health and the environment. In addition, rapid technological improvement, reduced lifespan of electronic and electrical devices, low effective collection and recycling rates have led to an increased generation of e-waste. According to the United Nations University, Singaporeans are the second largest producers of e-waste, with 19.95kg of e-waste generated per capita in 2014. These trends are worrying and warrant attention from policymakers, producers, and consumers alike.
National Legislation on E-Waste Management
On 14 June 2016, the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) submitted the Resource Sustainability Bill for public consultation. If the Bill is accepted by Parliament, regulatory schemes will be shored up and businesses trading new MOH products, regulated electronic products and regulated batteries will be required to register with the Government. The Government will then implement extended producer responsibility systems where businesses take on a shared producer responsibility for the funding of system costs and bear the licensing obligations. To help businesses and consumers comply, the Public Waste Collector, who had already registered with NEA, will be in the scheme to provide collection points or collection services to take back used regulated products for disposal. The scheme will also necessitate only the export of regulated products to fulfill the prescribed export requirements, and the import of regulated products from operators who meet the prescribed standards.
Up to mid-2016, there is no specific piece of legislation that mandates e-waste management as part of the waste management process. Nevertheless, e-waste disposal is regulated under the Environmental Protection and Management Act (EPMA). The EPMA makes it an offence to discharge or dispose of any toxic, corrosive, explosive or other hazardous substance in a manner causing harm to people, property or the environment, or likely to affect public health or cause public nuisance. Apart from the EPMA, the management of e-waste is similarly subjected to the Second Schedule of the Hazardous Waste (Control of Export, Import and Transit) Act (HWA). Under this scheme, items listed in the Second Schedule of the HWA must be managed and had their disposal specially approved by the Director-General before they can be exported, imported, or even transited from Singapore.
Technological Advancements in E-Waste Recycling
The rapid growth of e-waste secondary material is a result of increasing requirements for, and advancements in, electronic products. This growth, in turn, spurs technological advancements in e-waste recycling. Given the diversity and complexity of e-waste materials that are being continuously developed and manufactured, there is now a constant struggle to develop e-waste recycling processes that are economically feasible. The application of innovative and advanced e-waste treatment and recycling technologies will also help overcome the challenges associated with the recycling of valuable elements and compounds that are readily intimately intermixed in advanced e-waste, which is defined as e-waste that does not contain only bulk metals. Ensuring that the processes are environmentally safe is of equal importance. Although useful approaches for the recycling and recovery of valuable and critical raw materials from electronic wastes have been proposed in the past decade, some of them remain at the laboratory scale. Only a few have advanced in recent years in research phases, and even fewer have been commercialized for actual applications.
Singapore has come a long way in the development of e-waste recycling and recovery technologies. The 1980s saw the emergence of the first environmentally-friendly e-waste recycling plant, and in the past two decades, a number of such companies with state-of-the-art technology in e-waste recycling have been set up. Many are homegrown. Located in the western or northern parts of Singapore, these recycling plants can handle precious metal recovery from waste of various types of electronic goods, such as computer printed circuit boards, mobile liquid crystal display (LCD) supports, and glass substrates. The recovery processes are typically chemical and pyrometallurgical in nature. These processes do not generate hazardous waste, and the companies have to meet stringent environmental conditions regulated by the sampling and surveillance of environmental pollutants discharged into the surrounding air and water.
Challenges and Solutions in IT Equipment Disposal
The second challenge is with resource conservation and toxic chemicals usage in the electronics manufacturing and disposal processes. The third challenge is compliance with e-waste disposal standards and environmental protection regulations. The fourth challenge is to manage the scope of work for electronics collection and disposal data in a cost-effective manner.
Enterprises move on to other enterprise applications, but the data on the storage media is forgotten. Even this minor incident can get the organization into trouble, but the note that we read has the effects of wiping out the data that is still kept on the device or on. Companies that need to be compliant with the data security standards require electronics disposal providers to provide a certificate of data destruction as a form of legal evidence. These corporations would also contract the electronics disposal suppliers to perform on-site or supervised data destruction, as they don’t trust the providers’ data handling processes during the equipment transportation to the electronics facilities.
The first challenge is to ensure compliance with data security requirements during the disposal process. Some of the organizations that need to comply with these standards include customer information protection, financial industry record keeping, and defense secrecy. Data wipes are typically done on hard disks, SSDs, SIMMs, and other storage devices. However, there are also several other forms of storage media that are contained in the IT devices, such as NVRAM, Compact Flash (CF), Secure Digital (SD) memory cards, and BIOS, that are not typically wiped of their data. The organizations would need to look for electronics disposal providers that provide destruction services for the residual storage media.
When organizations are ready for IT equipment recycling and disposal, they normally schedule the pickup of the IT equipment disposal with their electronics disposal provider. However, this seemingly simple chore is fraught with several challenges, and most of these challenges exist because organizations have important processes in the disposal of their IT equipment.
Data Security Concerns
A co-location data center in Singapore has recommended a minimum of seven passes through Department of Defense (DOD) algorithms for that level of data security to be successfully reached. A physical destruction method in data destruction, devices such as shredders, crushers, and disintegrators are used to mangle the storage devices to the desired state that can’t be undone, thereby ensuring data security. The devices can be reduced all the way down to their constituent individual components if the client so wishes. There is also currently a second level of data destruction that requires the shredding of solid-state storage devices for that additional greater level of assurance in data destruction through physical destruction methods.
In addition to other general data management concerns, a company’s IT assets can contain sensitive, critical, or proprietary information. Common examples include client and vendor data, corporate emails and frameworks, new product designs or financial models, strategies, memos, reports, patents, contact lists, and inventory data. It is thus self-evident that unauthorized access to or loss of the above information could adversely affect the company’s competitive standing, legal ability, brand reputation, and tangible asset worth, amongst a dozen other such negative effects. Thus, there is a pressing need to protect against these potential breaches from arising. And in a disposal process, it is preferable for the company to ensure that the data is beyond retrieval capability, or data erasure, usually by the typical utility of data destruction, or magnetic sheer of storage devices.
