Two Chinese graduates, Sun Wenzhouand Chen Leifeng, have turned to e-commerce to help tackle the country’s mounting piles of e-waste, launching Aihuishou.com (which means in Chinese “love recycling”). This is the first Chinese competitive customer-to-business e-commerce site focused on electronic products such as mobile phones and laptops. The site has its own logistic staffs, which collects the used devices. Recycling firms then bid to buy them in batches, before processing the items for recycling or disassembling them as electronic waste.The key is the competitive bidding by recycling companies. By working with Aihuishou.com, recycling companies can obtain reliable and tested devices, while the phone’s original owner gets the best price. The phones are sent to legitimate companies for recycling, to be disassembled, or for metals processing. Mobile phone recycling, until now scattered around China’s cities, is being brought onto a single e-commerce platform. The sidebar of the website features a constantly updated list of completed deals, giving the time of the transaction and type of phone, and shoppers can trade in their old phones for new ones, and Aihuishou gets more customers and phones. There are similarly large markets in China for flat-screen TVs, laptops and digital cameras. According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China had 1.24 billion mobile phone users, with 100 million phones discarded annually, less than 1% of these are recycled. It’s not easy to recycle mobile phones, and poor quality recycling pollutes the environment and harms public health. In fact, these devices are made mostly out of plastic and metal; plastics do not break down naturally and when burned release noxious gases: copper, lead and zinc can be toxic and if not properly handled pollute the soil, groundwater and the environment. The gLawcal Team POREEN project Thursday, 23 October 2014 (Source: China Dialogue)