The coronavirus pandemic has altered the course of events globally since the outbreak of the corona virus disease (COVID-19) late 2019 further giving credence to the long standing beliefthat the world is indeed a global village. There have been different responses by countries to the raging pandemic including imposition of lockdowns, quarantine and isolation. The imposition of the lockdown whether full or partial, has not been without major consequences leading to resort to information, communication and technological (ICT) based measures to minimize the effect of the lockdown and as an alternative to physical interactions. The use of ICT devices to bridge the gaps created by the lockdown on schools, business offices and other sectors, has led to increased use of electronic devices. The challenge of electronic waste (e-waste) management in developing countries has been on for a while and the increased use of electronic devices is likely to compound the challenge during, and post COVID-19. Whilst the development of ICT based options as viable alternative to face-to-face interactions may not be a negative development, the paper argues that the existing frameworks are inadequate to manage the resultant increase in e-waste in most developing countries and that there is need more than ever before for developing countries to exercise caution in embracing these ICT based options without putting in place measures to ensure that there is increased capacity to manage and dispose the e-waste created thereby.
Content
Author and article information
Journal
Title:
UCL Open: Environment Preprint
Publisher:
UCL Press
Publication date
(Electronic preprint):
27
January
2021
Affiliations
[1
] Department of Business Law, Obafemi Awolowo University
[2
] Department of Public Law, Obafemi Awolowo University
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original author and source are credited.
History
Date
received
: 27
January
2021
Data availability: Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Handling Editors: COVID-19 interactions with our Environment series Editors: Dr Francesco Aletta, Prof Julien S Baker, Prof Dan Osborn
This article is a preprint article and has not been peer-reviewed. It is under consideration following submission to UCL Open: Environment Preprint for open peer review.