According to Sustainability Victoria, electronic waste, or e-waste, is growing exponentially, at around three times the rate of general waste, yet we only recycle about four per cent of it.

It is estimated that the amount of e-waste generated in Victoria is projected to increase from 109,000 tonnes in 2015, to approximately 256,000 tonnes in 2035.

And since China stopped receiving some 70 per cent of Australia’s e-waste, the nation has been left in the lurch. 

But one 17-year-old Trentham resident is working to make a difference by diverting e-waste, which is described as any item with a plug or cord, from going to landfill. 

Albert Smallwood has always had an interest in computers. 

“I’ve always been into computers and worked with older machines. I had all my own waste and didn’t know what to do with it until I watched that War on Waste show which showed how much [waste] there really is,” he said.

Mr Smallwood’s school, in Ballarat, was throwing out around 100 PC’s when he decided to take action.

“When I asked where they were going to go they said they were just going to put them all in the bin. So I said I’d take it all. That was the first thing I did and since then, I have collected [e-waste] from more and more schools.”

There are piles of gutted PC’s, printers, modems and smaller white goods items stacked in his backyard, ready to be sent off to recycling facilities. 

He said Victoria was lucky in that there were facilities to send products to, but it takes a lot of effort to do so.

He sends metals and copper to Ballarat Scrap Metal and Recycling (BSMR) and boards and cables to Brunswick MRI. 

But at the moment, there is a huge gap in the recycling system. 

“At the moment, hard plastic items, like printers, which I have a lot of, go to landfill because nobody recycles them. There’s is one company in NSW but it would cost me too much to send items there.

“So it all has to go to landfill. It’s a bit depressing. But at least I am able to recycle everything else.”

“At the moment it costs more to buy new ink than buy a new printer so a lot of people throw it out when it runs out of ink and buy a new one.”

All the action happens in his family shed, where Mr Smallwood has set up a component sorting station.

He mostly only services schools and businesses so he can pick up large amounts of items at a time, but is working on a drop-off point.

“Australia’s industry was all about packaging our stuff up and sending it overseas, but now we have to recycle stuff ourselves, which is making it a lot harder for companies to take stuff in, plus they’re not able to provide any avenues for the public to drop things off,” he said.

He said the government needed to pump more funding into the recycling industry, especially towards e-waste.

Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastics are a hard plastic that is difficult to recycle, given the chemicals it contains.

Mr Smallwood said places like California, and Europe, have developed technology to recycle it, but Australia had not yet jumped on board.

“We are just behind with technology,” he said. “We haven’t got any infrastructure for recycling so we just have to get some industry started.”

“We need the government to step in and do something about this - especially for plastics.”

With up to 90 per cent of phones and computers able to be recycled but one in five people hoarding or throwing devices in the bin, an estimate of AUD $80 billion of valuable raw materials were disposed of in 2016.

E-waste products contain many useful items which can be gutted for valuable products and thereafter recycled. Metals like gold, silver and platinum, as well as glass, can all be recycled from e-waste products which have reached the end of their useful lives. 

However, the products also contain hazardous resources which can have dire effects, such as lead, cadmium and beryllium. 

A Basal Action Network investigation, funded by the United Nations, released in 2018, tracked where e-waste was being recycled through the employment of GPS trackers.

Deploying trackers inside 35 pieces of non-functional electronic waste equipment in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, the investigators tracked where the items were transferred to.

The results were damning, with two being exported, one moved to a seaport, four moved to landfill, seven never moving and only 11 being transferred to recycling facilities. Six lost signal after delivery and two were moved to unknown locations.

Developing countries receive a lot of Australia’s e-waste, with the disposal methods used there, like burning, damaging to both the environment and human health. 

The Victorian government last year announced that it would ban all e-waste from entering landfill from July 1, 2019.

It is investing $16.5 million to upgrade more than 130 e-waste collection and storage facilities across the state. An infrastructure collection station will soon be built at Daylesford and at Creswick for $88,750 each.

The upgrades, part of a reformation of e-waste management laws, will mean councils will be equipped to discard of electronics, strip them of components for reprocessing into new technology or re-sold as second hand goods in the hope it will reduce the number of disused electronic equipment going to landfill.

Ballarat Transfer Station already accepts white goods as a free service, except refrigerators. It also accepts televisions, computers and computer parts.