Economic Opportunities with the Recovery

The potential economic opportunities associated with the recovery of materials are also responsible for the advent of informal markets in developing countries not equipped to process used and end-of-use computers efficiently and safely for workers’ health and the environment. 

From an economic perspective, informal material recovery processors lose significant amounts of metals that could be more effectively recovered through the use of existing state-of-the-art technologies. More importantly, these informal markets employ recycling and materials recovery techniques that expose workers and the environment to potentially harmful pollutants.