Electronic recycling plant opens in Sydney

Environment Minister Peter Garrett has opened a new e-waste recycling plant,but environmentalists are falling over themselves to say that it was not enough to solve the country's epidemic of gadgety garbage.

The automated recycling plant in Sydney is said to be the first of its kind and can recycle 20,000 tonnes of electronic waste when at full capacity.

However, Australians dump an estimated 140,000 tonnes of hazardous e-waste and Planet Ark founder Jon Dee said the plant would hardly be used because the Government had not introduced a national scheme that would make it easy for people to recycle their old electronics.

Even the electronics industry has also called for such a scheme, but the government does not really want to set one up. Computer manufacturers such as Dell and HP, councils and the mobile industry through its Mobile Muster program offer e-waste recycling services, but Dee said these were all ad hoc, hidden and hardly used.

Dee added that a flashy new recycling plant was useless unless you have a constant supply of computers going into it and, as it happened, most monitors and old computers are all heading for landfill.

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