Question

Question is designed by Role play on a real incident:

On 2 September 2016, Samsung suspended sales of the Galaxy Note 7 and announced an informal recall, after it was found that a manufacturing defect in the phones' batteries had caused some of them to generate excessive heat, resulting in fires. Suppose that a factory in US is now operated for the recycling of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and you are employed as the head of the waste management team. Please prepare a hazardous waste management action plan for the recycling of Samsung Galaxy Note 7, so that all the hazardous components are properly handled according to the US standards.

You are required to design an emergency response plan (overview and procedure) to persuade your boss/supervisor to use your plan. You are selected to follow the Basel Convention and Your State -California regulation to design the plan. You need to include the suggestions, considerations and demonstrations below.

- Suggest appropriate safety measures and good operation practices while recycling, reuse, disposal

- Suggest appropriate treatments for the by-products associated from the recycling processes

- Any economical consideration(s) help to convince your boss to use your planning? Cost-Saving?

- Demonstrate that how does the action plan comply with the US standards

Answer 1

Appropriate Safety Measures

1. Refurbish unsold devices and repurpose unproblematic components like cameras.

2. These components can be sold as part of the future phones.

3. The company must harvest and recycle the raw materials in an environmentally friendly manner for parts which can not be repurposed.

4. Do research in developing environmentally friendly technology to recycle smartphones.

Appropriate Treatments for the by-products

1. Resort to electrical fragmentation, immersion of phones in liquid and application of electrical discharges turning them into harmful acoustic shockwaves. Once this is done, there would be more than 60 phone elements, all containing high amounts of gold, silver, copper, titanium, indium, tantalum and nickel relative to the normal composition in the Earth's crust.

2. Clean the reusable parts before the above step.

Economical Considerations

This would definitely lead to cost saving as a lot of parts would be in perfect shape and could be reused. As we have seen above, even after destroying a phone, a lot of expensive elements can be found which could be sold profitably or reused later in other devices.