Douglas Marowa, from
the different institute of the India. wrote a research article
about, Sustainable Solutions: Addressing E-Waste Pollution and Ensuring
Food Security. entitled, Need for sustainable solution: Environment, rural
agriculture and food security affected by electronic waste pollution of streams
and Sakubva River. This research paper published by the International
Journal of Agronomy and Agricultural Research (IJAAR). an open access
scholarly research journal on Agronomy, under the affiliation of the International
Network For Natural Sciences | INNSpub. an open access
multidisciplinary research journal publisher.
Abstract
Electronic waste is
currently the largest growing waste stream in the world. It is hazardous,
complex and expensive to treat in an environmentally sound manner.
Unsustainable electronic waste management of has led to pollution of rivers,
which has negatively affected the environment, agriculture activities and food
security. The research sought to investigate the waste management of electronic waste, its impact on environment, agriculture and food security in the rural
communities. To recommend sustainable waste management strategy for the country
and reduce the adverse effects on environment and agriculture to enhance food
security. Zimbabwe has become an electronic waste hazard as waste pile up at
backyard and in houses. A research survey was conducted in Mutare urban and
peri-urban rural communities involving a sample of 1250 participants revealed
that 29% of waste was electronic effluent, 29% of waste in backyard, 22% of
waste in storerooms. The peri-urban rural communities are heavily affected
downstream as the Sakubva River and its streams are polluted, either poisoned
or drying up. Methods of disposal were landfilling, burning, backyard and
storeroom storage. Food security as a state where the availability,
accessibility, utilization and stability of food are ensured and food
production is enough to cover the food demand of the people has been heavily
affected as water for gardening and field crop irrigation is polluted. It was
revealed that in some areas farmers have totally stopped gardening as the
source of water has dried up due to both soil and water pollution.
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Introduction
The United Nations (2008) defines food security as a state where the availability, accessibility, utilization and stability of food are ensured and food production is enough to cover the food demand of the people. FAO (2010) reviewed that despite the fact that more than enough food was being produced per capita to adequately feed the global population, about 925 million people remained food insecure in 2010. Abalansa et al. (2021) indicated that electronic waste is a rapidly developing environmental problem particularly for the most developed countries that has negatively affected the sustainable agriculture practices for food security. Electronic waste are various forms of electric and electronic equipment that have ceased to be of value to their users or no longer satisfy their original purpose (Gill, 2021). The electronic waste products have exhausted their utility value through either redundancy, replacement, or breakage and this include both “white goods” such as refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves and “brown goods” such as televisions, radios, computers, and cell phones (Gill, 2021). Electronic waste is considered the "fastest-growing waste stream in the world” (WEF, 2019) with 44.7 million tonnes generated in 2016- equivalent to 4500 Eiffel towers Balde et al. (2017). In 2018, an estimated 50 million tonnes of electronic waste was reported, thus the name ‘tsunami of electronic waste’ given by the United Nations (WEF, 2019). Its value is at least $62.5 billion annually (WEF, 2019).
The world currently has
a variety of environmental problems resulting from manufacturing activities,
including plastic pollution and electronic waste. Plastic pollution can be
traced back to the beginning of the commercial production of plastics in the
1950s (Barnes et al., 2009), but more recently, electronic waste is considered
an emerging environmental problem (Saldana-Duran et al., 2020). The sources of
the majority of these can be traced to major developed countries, although
there is an increasing contribution from rapidly developing countries like
China and India. The Basel Convention was formulated to ensure that
environmental problems are not exported across boundaries (Choksi, 2001;
Ogunseitan, 2013; Kummer, 1992). Developed countries have state-of-the-art
facilities, finances and technology to handle waste (Forti et al., 2020).
However, much of the electronic waste is not recycled but exported to
developing countries (Illes and Geeraerts, 2016), which are already struggling
with economic problems such as poverty. Many factors contribute to this surge
in electronic waste. These include the short lifecycle of equipment, low
recycling (Rabani and Thakur, 2020), and the continuous upgrading of electronic
equipment (Wang et al., 2019) as affluent societies demand the latest
technology. Electronic waste has been described as one of most difficult
classes of waste to manage due to a constant change in its features and
specificities (Borthakur and Singh, 2020). Recently, Zimbabwe has also been
become an electronic waste hazard as electronic equipment are piling up very
fast in company offices and in houses. Electronic scrap components, such as
central processing units, contain potentially harmful materials such as lead,
cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame-retardants. Recycling and disposal of
electronic waste may involve significant risk to health of workers and their
communities (Sakar, 2016). According to the Basel Convention (1989) on the
Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal of
1989, Art. 2(1), "'Wastes' are substance or objects, which are disposed of
or are intended to be disposed of or are required to be disposed of by the
provisions of national law" (Basel Convention, 1989). Under the Waste
Framework Directive 2008/98/EC, Art. 3(1), the European Union defines waste as
"an object the holder discards, intends to discard or is required to
discard."(EPC, 2008).
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