How your TV ended up in a magical realm

During the pandemic, working from home has become a new normal and the demand for savvy smart devices has never been greater. According to various online sources, the global smart TV market oversaw an exponential growth during the pandemic, with worldwide revenues upped by 19% in 2021 and revenue nearly doubling between 2016 and 2020. Your good old functional TV, which had duly entertained you for over a decade, doing its job broadcasting perfectly your favourite channels day in day out, was thrown away because it wasn’t internet-enabled.

I’ll save you the time of asking you this one of the world’s most cliché questions, “have you ever wondered what actually happened to the TV you threw away?” Well, you probably know the answer at face value. “Perhaps it was picked up by a local recycler?” “The courier said it would be properly processed into reusable secondary resources.” “I know there is a licensed contractor appointed to manage all this e-waste legally.” The more curious person may ask, “But how is it actually done?”

Welcome to the magical realm! Your TV was just magically vanished into thin air. Does it not remind you of the ruthless finger snap by the autocratic Thanos, wiping off half the living population in the blink of an eye? Before I continue to ramble on about Thanos and other far-fetched comparisons, though, let me ask you to take a moment, maybe 20 seconds, and really think about this one of world’s most cliché questions, “The last time you threw away your TV, what actually happened to it?”

Time’s up! Have you figured it out?

The answer is yes you are right, it was delivered to a designated treatment plant to be processed into secondary resources. Then, you might ask, “What is the fuss all about? We all knew it at “face value”. What else is there to know?” Now, if you are still intrigued at this point, please stay on and continue reading it. If you find this post irrelevant and riddled with silly grammar mistakes, I understand I am a bad writer but I’d still thank you for making the effort all the way down to this paragraph.

Without further ado, allow me to quickly give you a brief history lesson about the E-waste industry in Hong Kong.

Each year there are around 70,000MTs of E-waste generated, with most being exported for reuse or recovery of valuable materials prior to the introduction of WPRS in 2016. Simply put, it requires relevant stakeholders to share the responsibility and cost for the collection, recycling, treatment and disposal of end-of-life E-waste. Under WPRS, air-conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, computers, printers, scanners and monitors are classified as Regulated Electrical Equipment (REE). These items can only be collected and managed by local recyclers or licensed service providers. This approach standardised the recycling industry for E-waste and strategically reduced the risk of irresponsible handling and subsequent contamination that had compromised the well-being of our home city.

The timing of the introduction coincided with the tightening trade control of E-waste in the international community, since E-waste contains extremely harmful materials hazardous to the environment and human health, rendering exporting a less favourable strategy while the demand for it had also declined due to rapid economic development in recipient economies. That said, Hong Kong needed a safe and responsible solution to treat E-waste domestically and in 2018 the commissioning of the WEEE ? PARK provided just what was desperately needed. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, a similar concept to E-waste.

Over the past three years, WEEE ? PARK managed over 2 million pieces of WEEE in Hong Kong with state-of-the-art technologies from overseas but tailored to local needs. WEEE was collected invariably from all walks of life at no cost incurred to the givers and was delivered to the treatment facility in Tuen Mun. With four processing lines, the collected items would go through four key processes, including detoxification, sorting, dismantling and finally recycling, converting WEEE into iron, metal, aluminium and plastic, which were passed on to relevant manufacturers as secondary raw materials. This in turn contributes to a reduction in mining activities, which have caused severe depletion of natural resources and led to a conspicuous amount of carbon emission over the years because most mining activities involve excessively carbon-intensive means. By recycling WEEE, we are balancing out the need for mining. To demonstrate the facility’s efficiency with reference to a major milestone, more than 140,000 tonnes of Carbon Emission have been prevented since Day One of its operation!

With all these explanations, it might feel a bit anti-climactic as the magical realm may not quite sound as magical and instead seems “disappointingly” mechanical. And you cannot be more right. Yes, the magical realm is fairy-tale like and perhaps a catchword to draw your attention. Thanos is not real either! Let’s face it. Every time you or I threw away a piece of E-waste, there was a lot going on behind the scene. Complex logistics arrangement, labour-intensive lifting, accurate sorting, automated and safe detoxification, and many other steps JUST to ensure our TVs were safely dismantled and converted into reusable items.

To summarise, WEEE ? PARK heralds four primary pillars that are “collection”, “recycling”, “donation” and “education” to warrant a smooth and transparent recycling journey for the givers while boasting an average of 80% efficiency in its recycling rate. Collectively as a community, we have all contributed in tackling WEEE in Hong Kong in recent years, though, the only way to move forward to zero-carbon is in Education. As #NelsonMandela once said, “The future belongs to our youth… younger people must take over.” Building awareness among our students and the general public is key to how we want to shape the future of our community. One way, which has been proven quite successfully, would be organising a WEEE recycling day with us. This practice is simple yet effective and here are a few ideas:

1. Schedule a collection day with ALBA IWS through our web portal or hotline ;
2. Sort out the WEEE that are deemed obsolete within your facility;
3. Carve out a space temporarily (usually on the ground level and somewhere accessible) to store your WEEE items sorted from the second step;
4. Set up a booth to share information about the harmfulness of WEEE and its associated environmental costs, and the corrective steps to discontinue these damages;
5. ?Invite students, residents, colleagues and anyone else to bring in their WEEE from home;
6. Courier will arrive on the scheduled time to collect your WEEE!

These practices strengthen the understanding of WEEE for our community, provide every participant a real-life experience in recycling WEEE, and set an example for the general public. Rest-assured the collection service is free and your most important task is to ensure that your sorting of WEEE aligns with the Regulated Electrical Equipment (REE) category. By the way we are open to all sorts of ideas. This is just one example of our awareness-building exercise.

Echoing my opening paragraphs, let’s go back to the cliché question, “do you now know what actually happened to the TV you threw away most recently?”

Thank you very much for taking the time to read through this post. If you feel that your organisation would be interested in arranging a recycling day to build awareness, feel free to contact me privately on inbox. We are delighted to provide more materials to assist in your effort to organise a WEEE recycling day.

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