During its cultural season, the Environmental Research Center at U.O.T. organized a webinar on zoom entitled "E-waste and its effects on humans and the environment", in the presence of the Director of the Center, Prof. Dr. Abdul Hameed M. Jawad Al-Obaidi, and several academics, researchers and university employees.
The lecture was delivered by Professor Dr. Khalid M. Hussain Al-Qaisi at the University of Sulaymaniyah.
The lecture included a definition of e-waste as one of the forms of environmental pollution. As a result of the scientific progress that modern man has sought, which has achieved some gains for him, his rights have been violated and accompanied by damages that threaten his humanity with annihilation.
He added that industrial and technological progress and the huge expansion in the use of various energy sources led to the spread of entertainment, tools, and products of contemporary industrial civilization and the production of large quantities of electronic devices on an almost daily basis, such as computers, televisions, mobile phones and other devices that work with an electric current or electromagnetic fields that Its lifespan has expired and is discarded as electronic waste that harms the environment and health public.
On the other hand, coinciding with the technical progress, the prices of new electronic products decrease, and then the demand for these new products increases, and the older devices are thrown away.
He explained that old electrical and electronic devices are called electronic waste and are included in hazardous waste because they contain hazardous materials such as lead, barium, mercury, batteries, electrical circuits... etc.
Therefore, it poses a threat to the environment and human health if it is handled, stored, and transported improperly, as all industrialized countries suffer from problems related to dealing with these wastes, as there was a need in the past to carry out costly cleaning operations due to incorrect handling of these dangerous wastes.
Finally, this lecture came to shed light on one of the most important issues that affect human life, health, and the environment, which is electronic waste, which requires us to remind the specialists to take the necessary measures from scientific and technical dealings and to legislate laws to deal with these materials, whether by safe disposal or by recycling them to take advantage of many of their components.
Translated by: Deputy Chief Translators/ Rana A. Kareem
Modified by: Dr. Mohammed Muayad Taha
