With the opening of this year's "two sessions time", Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, as a deputy to the National People's Congress, also released the "My 2022 Two Sessions Proposal" on the public account a few days ago. In the proposal, Lei Jun suggested formulating a medium- and long-term overall development plan for the recycling of electronic waste; vigorously cultivating market players and promoting the coordinated development of large and medium-sized enterprises in the industry; ensuring the security of personal data and information, avoiding the leakage of personal information by equipment such as waste mobile phones, and improving the recycling rate of electronic waste; and carrying out personal carbon credit pilots to promote the participation of the whole people.
As the helmsman of Xiaomi, a world-renowned technology company, Lei Jun's proposal is obviously from the industry. According to the "Global E-waste Monitoring Report 2020" released by the United Nations University, the National Telecommunication Union and the International Solid Waste Association, it is expected that the global annual output will reach 74.7 million tons of e-waste in 2030, and the report also reveals that the current recycling rate of e-waste in the mainland is less than 20%, while Europe has reached 42.5%.
Why is it urgent to establish a reasonable recycling mechanism for waste electronic products? This is because in consumer electronics such as mobile phones and computers, there are high-value non-ferrous metals such as gold, silver and copper, but they also have harmful substances such as lead, cadmium, mercury, polymerated biphenyl ether, etc., which will seriously pollute the soil and air, and because of profitability, it has also led to a considerable number of unqualified small workshops participating in the recycling of waste electronic products, and even brought a series of environmental pollution problems, so even for environmental protection factors, a sound waste electronic products recycling mechanism is also needed.
According to data released by relevant Research Institutes in Japan, 150 grams of gold, 100 kilograms of copper, and 3 kilograms of silver can be extracted from a ton of discarded mobile phones. And Apple also mentioned in its annual "Environmental Responsibility Report" that every year through Dave and other dismantling robots, tens of millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, recycled aluminum and other recyclable materials are recovered from tens of thousands of iPhones. It should be known that according to public data, the grade of mainland gold mines is generally 5 grams / ton, in contrast, the efficiency of "alchemy" with waste mobile phones is undoubtedly higher than that of mining gold mines.
The mobile phone uses gold material, mainly because it is a very good conductor, so mobile phone manufacturers usually cover a few microns of gold at various interfaces on the mobile phone motherboard to improve conductivity. However, the structure of the mobile phone motherboard is extremely complex, and even the fully automatic motherboard disassembly technology is basically absent now. Nowadays, the dismantling of the conscience is mainly based on manual operation, which is carried out in the order from the outside to the inside, from large to small, and from simple to complex, and then extracted by "hydrometallurgy"
In fact, the technical threshold of the waste electronic product recycling industry is not low. In the words of Tang Aijun, secretary general of the China Electronic Equipment Technology Development Association, it is "the investment in this line is large, the effect is slow, the operating cost is high, and its profitability is weak." Compared with the small workshops that can start work in front of the house and after the house, the formal renewable resources enterprises only fix the labor cost, which is 50%-60% more, where is the competitiveness? ”
At present, there are very few formal resource recycling companies specializing in the metal refining of scrap electronic products, which is why. A few years ago, there were media reports on the world's largest electronic garbage dump in Ghana, Africa, where more than 5 million tons of various types of waste electronic products are continuously delivered here every year, and after the manual "dismemberment" of more than 40,000 surrounding farmers, incineration and landfilling not only released a large amount of poisonous gas, but even the groundwater was destroyed.
Yes, the recycling of waste electronic products is actually a very high threshold industry, traditional handicraft workshops can usually only use non-ferrous metals melting point far more than plastics, lead and mercury principle, through incineration to refine gold, silver and other precious metals, so naturally also brought extremely high pollution.
Obviously, this status quo is not justified. And Lei Jun will put forward such a proposal, no doubt out of the consumer electronics industry practitioners of the sense of responsibility, just as Apple wants to cancel the charger in the name of environmental protection and use recycled aluminum on the iPhone.
However, in a sense, the business model of consumer electronics companies is also the "culprit" that causes the current massive waste electronic products. After all, almost all consumer electronics companies launch new products every year, phase out models that still work well, and use designs that are scheduled to be scrapped to force consumers to actively phase out obsolete devices every few years.
After all, for consumer electronics companies, the core of their business model is to sell more products, if consumers are "nail households" This game can not continue. However, consumer electronics companies are not indifferent to the status quo, and have brought about the elimination of chargers, the use of renewable materials on equipment, the promotion of old-for-new activities, etc., but the end result is that domestic consumers are not active in this, and the recycling rate of waste electronic products is less than half of the European market.
So why don't consumers buy it? The reason is actually very simple, because whether it is the official recycling price of mobile phone manufacturers, or the purchase price of platforms such as love recycling and transfer, it is often not satisfactory, and the way of recycling is also very troublesome. On the other hand, there are also consumers who have certain concerns about whether these manufacturers can solve the problem of not leaking personal information. Presumably, everyone has heard such rumors to a greater or lesser extent, that is, even after formatting the mobile phone, professionals still have a way to recover the data in it, and professional data cleaning obviously has a certain threshold, and it is often difficult for ordinary consumers to do it.
Once the personal privacy is leaked, the consequences are undoubtedly very serious, and compared with the remuneration for recycling waste products, it seems to be a bit more than worth the loss, so it also leads to consumers preferring to idle rather than recycle old equipment. After all, for consumers, whether it is for environmental protection factors to meet their spiritual pursuits, or in exchange for a certain material return, it is based on the fact that all this will not damage themselves.
Lei Jun mentioned in the proposal that "ensuring the security of personal data and information and avoiding the leakage of personal information by equipment such as waste mobile phones" is to avoid these worries of consumers. However, to solve the problem of leakage of personal information, if you want to continue to increase the recycling rate of waste electronic products, you may also need to "induce it to profit", which is why the incentive strategy of "personal carbon credit" was born. After all, if you give money directly, less consumers feel that it is not worth it, and more recyclers will also lose money.
Carbon credits can avoid this problem to a certain extent, carbon credits is the most typical application scenario of carbon dioxide emission rights, undoubtedly in the automobile market, Tesla by selling carbon credits to make billions of news, presumably many friends have also heard. Although the current carbon credit and the corresponding carbon trading are mainly concentrated at the enterprise level, and have nothing to do with individual consumers for the time being, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan and other places have been exploring "carbon inclusion", so that individuals' behavior of reducing carbon dioxide emissions will become the "carbon credit" in everyone's account, and then through the docking of the carbon trading market and various commercial consumption platforms, consumers can also get benefits through low-carbon behavior.
Therefore, using the concept of environmental protection as an internal driving force, and then using carbon credits as a substantial incentive, it may be possible for consumers to recycle the waste electronic products that are on the shelf.