The first award!

And it's finally happened. Well actually two things have finally happened but only one that we can announce publicly at the moment. The one we can talk about is that E-LIFE has won its first festival award. We are very grateful for the Impact DOCS Awards to grant us the Award of Excellence Special Mention: Documentary Feature. It is always a huge relief when you make a film and it receives any kind of accolade but it is very special receiving one from Impact because of the caliber of films we are alongside. The festival is a Californian based organisation that hands out awards to films that try and change the world. 

The second announcement is that E-LIFE has secured distribution, the details of which we will reveal in the very near future. 

E-LIFE 52

Due to positive feedback from our distributors, we are now working on a 52 minute version of E-LIFE, which is easier to pitch towards TV channels. Hopefully it will come to a TV near to you! One of the things the distributors have mentioned to the E-LIFE team after watching the film is how this subject is only going to get more relevant as we consume more electronics as a society. Of course we knew this when we made E-LIFE but there is one important factor that people do not think about when evaluating the rise of eWaste in the future and that is how much more difficult it will become to recycle it. 

An early concept poster for E-LIFE, showing different individual pieces of broken electronics from Agbogbloshie, the scrap yard in Accra, Ghana. 

We are well past the golden days of e-recycling, when big old CRTs contained bundles of copper and phones had a lot more gold in them. As things are miniaturised and manufacturing becomes more efficient, the amount of recyclable material is reduced, and what is in the average bit of tech becomes harder to extract. We are fast driving towards a point where eWaste will become almost useless to us in terms of recycling, unless there are advancements in recycling technologies or in the repairability and modularity of our electronics products.