Guarantee the proper recycling and reuse of used electronic items

These companies make huge profits selling electronic items, for example in the 4th quarter of 2017 Apple posted revenue of $52.6 billion and net quarterly profit of $10.7 billion. Apple sold 46.7 million iPhones during this same period. A lot of that profit comes from selling newer versions of an existing product to existing customers, with no consideration for the older product. These older products and broken or obsolete items invariably end up in the rubbish in the UK or being shipped overseas to countries like China, or more recently Thailand and Malaysia, who have no capability to properly recycle these items. These electronic items sit around covering vast areas of land slowly polluting the soil and ground water and causing health problems for local communities.

These electronic companies promote and benefit massively from promoting consumerism, but deal with non of the consequences of our throw away society that they have helped create. These electronic items contain lots of plastic and hard to extract natural resources such as cadium or lithium. The extraction of these metals from the environment invariably leads to environmental degradation, we are then throwing these products away causing further long lasting damage to the environment. We then have to extract more of these same materials that are thrown away to keep pace with demand.

It is time for the companies, who make such vast profits, to be held accountable for the environmental damage their products create. A tax should be levied by the British government on the profits of any of these companies domicile in the UK, to cover the cost of properly recycling and where possible reusing the various components of their electronic products.