War declared on world’s growing e-waste crisis

Patrick GALEY -
Weighing more than all commercial airliners ever built and worth more than most countries’ GDP, electronic waste poses a growing economic and environmental threat, experts said on Thursday, as they launched a global initiative to clean it up.
The world produces close to 50 million tonnes of e-waste every year as consumers and businesses throw out their old smartphones, computers and household appliances — material worth an estimated $62.5 billion (55 billion euros). Only a small percentage of the refuse, which contains valuable and reusable materials such as metals and rare earth elements vital for electronics, is ever recycled.
The United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, among the rich and powerful gathered in Davos this week, launched the first global call for action to counter what is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet.
“This is needed because if things don’t change by 2050 we will have 120 million tonnes per year of e-waste,” Ruediger Kuehr, programme director at United Nations University and an expert in e-waste, said.
“That’s not too far from today. It will have an impact on our resource availability and it’s impacting the lives of many, many people, especially in developing countries.” Only 20 per cent of electronics are currently recycled, with millions of tonnes ending up in landfills, wrongly mixed with metal waste, or illegally exported to poorer countries for a fee.
In 2016 alone, 435,000 tonnes of phones were discarded, despite containing billions of dollars’ worth of materials.
Just as plastic waste has become a hot-button issue in recent years, organisers of the call for a “global reboot” on e-waste hope governments, businesses and consumers will explore ways of reusing or repurposing electronics to limit the environmental fallout.
Kuehr said better collection networks of e-waste would have a significant impact, as would tech users properly disposing of their gadgets, rather than stuffing them in drawers and cabinets when a new generation comes out. The average smartphone contains up to 60 elements, mainly metals, that are prized in the electronics industry for their high conductivity and clarity. — AFP