ParceLive: No Hassle, No Waste

Turn on the television or glance at a newsfeed and you will likely see headlines hyping the latest facts and figures regarding global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprints, climate change, and rising sea levels, just to name a few.

Wait long enough or skim further down the page and you’ll soon be met with CEOs promising to look more closely at their claims of corporate social responsibility.

The next headline?  Probably something about protests, counter-protests, and, of course, opinion pieces and letters about how both sides are wrong.

But what is one to believe?  Is the environment as bad as the ‘experts’ say?  Are CEOs really the ones to blame?

Regardless of where you land in this speculative minefield, one thing is for certain:  electronic consumerism all along the supply value chains are killing the next generation of consumer, especially in Africa where waste is dumped on the order of 152,600 tonnes per annum.

There is little guarantee in realizing this vision, however, until there is a concentrated effort in correcting the current circular economy, reducing e-waste immediately, and holding those companies that fail to meet legislation to account.

The current e-waste situation:

First, it is important to have a working definition of e-waste, which, and per the European Commission, is considered waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) such as computers, television, refrigerators, and cell phones that all, when not properly disposed of, can cause major environmental and health problems.

Put another way, e-waste is any end-of-life electronic good (i.e., temperature exchange equipment, screen-based items, lamps, lightbulbs, large equipment like washing machines, small equipment to include microwaves, and small IT equipment like Global Positioning Systems (GPS)) that are discarded, donated, or given to a recycler so as to be salvaged as scrap by those employed within this sector in importing countries.

What then, is the big deal? you may be wondering.

You did your due diligence, right?  You took that old copier to the recycling point and, in so doing, provided jobs and means for an income to someone in a developing nation as they stripped away the estimated €55B worth of copper and gold still left in the discarded junk.

Right?

RIGHT?!

Sadly, you would be mistaken given that most recyclers, as was proofed out in a data-driven, GPS-guided study conducted in 2017, simply offloaded the largely plastic-based (read:  worthless and outdated) items to landfills in Ghana, Nigeria, and Thailand.

What’s more, and potentially worse, is this has been a known issue for decades with crisis-inducing statistics having been kept and monitored by the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations (UN), and numerous action groups.

The tipping point, however, now seems to be the direct causal link to increases in cancer in those living and working in landfills in Asia and Africa on account of the dangerous levels of dioxins, which have completely saturated the food chain with eggs and meat no longer safe for consumption.

So, how do we (yes, you and I included) stop killing our future customers when it comes to reverse logistics, recycling, and restoring the food chain? Easy—design it into the process so that garbage flows out.

Literally.

How ParceLive prevents e-waste and operational hassle at the source:

For any shipper, recycler, or manufacturer of information and communication technologies (ICT), ParceLive offers a turnkey solution to the social ills that come at the end of a product’s lifecycle.

Consider, ParceLive itself uses e-ink digital displays embedded within each GPS tracker so that they can be reused no matter the item being monitored along its supply-chain journey.

ParceLive channel partners and end-users simply inform the team at Hanhaa as to where they need trackers sent too, and when the journeys are complete, the trackers are sent back to a Hanhaa fulfilment centre via freepost where they are recharged and updated for their next journey. The aim here is too minimise the operational pain of companies having to deal with the trackers before and after use which in turn, has huge benefits for the environment minimising waste.