Electronic products such as mobile phones can contain 60 different elements and when these devices are sent to landfill, the metals and chemicals can potentially contaminate soil and water. 70% of the heavy metals, including cadmium, lead, mercury and arsenic, found in US landfill sites comes from electronic waste. These toxic substances can potentially seep into groundwater.
If electronic waste is recycled properly, heavy metals and rare minerals can be recovered profitably. For instance, it is possible to extract more gold from a ton of e-waste than a ton of ore. Recent Olympic medals contained gold extracted from e-waste.
However, much of this recycling is done in developing nations, where labour is cheap and health and environmental legislation is either lax or non-existent. Some US companies claim to process e-waste safely and locally but are known to have transported waste to the third world without authorisation and the preparation of a hazardous waste manifest.
US Government investigators from the Accountability Office posing as foreign importers in Hong Kong seeking to buy e-waste received offers from more than forty companies, even though it is illegal to import e-waste into China under Hong Kong and Chinese law and the Basel Convention.