In America alone, E-Waste or “Electronic Waste” constitutes 2% of the trash that make up landfills. Out of that 2%, a staggering 70% of that is considered toxic waste. What is also disposed of is copper and gold from the electronics. With a limited amount of materials that are able to be mined from the earth...it goes wasted. 

The electronics and many parts of decommissioned laboratory instrumentation that are scrapped can be reused or recycled. Sadly, it is not. Only a reported 12.5% of e-waste is recycled. This gravely adds to the growing concern for damaging our environment. Chemicals such as lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic from this equipment can in turn leach into the ground causing damage to the local fauna and flora. It can even cause damage to neighboring residential areas as the chemicals leach into the water sheds. 

Although there is a major lost opportunity with recycling this type of waste, there is a part your laboratory can play in preventing this in the first place. While scrapping companies make it easy to dispose of your equipment, we must also consider the overall impact it has on our world as a whole. The end result with a scrapper is that most of the equipment becomes waste and will end up in a landfill.

What can you do to help? 

By choosing to sell your equipment to Science On Budget, we will give your instrumentation new life. Our dedicated team of technicians can repair, test and validate the equipment can be placed back in another lab that is in need. Many instruments are considered end of life by the manufacturers. While they themselves do not service older equipment, companies such as ourselves have the resources to keep them running. Why deny other labs the opportunity to continue their research when budgets are tight and new equipment is almost always out of reach. 

There is also the consideration that not all equipment can be repaired and put back into service. In this case, our team will disassemble all the components for proper recycling of materials. Thus limiting the e-waste footprint.  So next time you are considering calling the scrapping company, please think of the big picture and what that means for the world. 

You can make a difference. Science on a Budget can help!