E-waste Experts Urge Public: Stop Trashing Electronic Products with Ordinary Garbage
The 14 billion kg of e-waste discarded with regular household garbage every year equals in weight ~24,000 of the world’s heaviest passenger planes – enough to form a queue from London-Helsinki, NY-Miami, Cairo-Tripoli, Bangkok- Calcutta
Careless habits squander precious resources; Proper e-waste management reduces CO2 equivalent emissions by 93 million tonnes per year — comparable to 20 million cars yearly
International E-waste Day 2024: Join the E-Waste Hunt – Retrieve, Recycle, and Revive!
To mark the upcoming International E-Waste Day, Oct. 14, consumers worldwide are urged to collect dead and / or unused electronics and electrical products and give them a second life through reuse or repair, or recycle them properly.
Above all: stop tossing them out in household waste bins.
The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (authored by UNITAR in cooperation with ITU), reported almost a quarter of end-of-life electronic waste ends up in home trash, squandering billions of dollars worth of copper, gold and other precious metals, materials critical to the production of such products, along with valuable plastics, and glass.
That’s 14 million tonnes of e-waste (dead or unused products with a battery or plug) discarded with ordinary household waste. That much e-waste works out to the weight of ~24,000 of the world’s heaviest passenger aircraft – enough to form an unbroken queue of giant planes from London to Helsinki, NY to Miami, Cairo to Tripoli, or Bangkok to Calcutta.
Says Pascal Leroy, Director General of the Brussels-based Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, the organisation behind International E-Waste Day: “Small electronic and electrical goods such as mobile phones, toys, remote controls, game consoles, headphones, lamps, screens and monitors, heating and cooling equipment, and chargers are everywhere. And electronic components embedded in consumer products large and small – even clothing – are now omnipresent. According to UNITAR and ITU, the 844 million e-cigarettes thrown away in 2022 alone contained enough lithium, for example, to power 15,000 electric cars.”
Adds Magdalena Charytanowicz of the WEEE Forum in charge of International E-Waste Day:”We know what to do, and we can do better.”
Ms. Charytanowicz says the place to start is the junk drawer, a common feature of homes around the world.
Globally, there are 108 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people. And earlier surveys have shown that European households alone store about 700 million unused or non-functioning mobile phones – an average of more than two per household.
She adds that “hoarding is an issue predominantly in wealthier countries. Elsewhere, reasons for keeping appliances are often personal data concerns or a desire to recover some of their value.”
A 2022 survey helped explain why so many EU households and businesses fail to bring WEEE in for repair or recycling.
Undertaken by WEEE Forum members – not-for-profit entities that collect e-waste from households and businesses on behalf of manufacturers, and consolidated by UNITAR’s Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme, the survey showed the average European household contains 74 e-products, such as phones, tablets, laptops, electric tools, hair dryers, toasters and other appliances (excluding lamps). The survey sample included 8,775 households across a diverse group of European Union countries – Portugal, Netherlands, Italy, Romania and Slovenia – combined with a UK survey,
Of the 74 average total e-products, 13 were being hoarded (9 of them unused but working, 4 broken).
Top reasons for this hoarding in Europe:
Others include:
Complementary research reveals what motivates people to recycle e-waste:
People are often surprised by information about the positive CO2 impact of e-waste recycling or simply happy to have done the ‘right thing’. See videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqZMb95b3Q
Many Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) – members of the WEEE Forum – organise communication campaigns and provide collection points, now more than 183,000 in all. To date, PROs have collected, cleaned, and recycled or sent for refurbishment 41.6 million tonnes of WEEE, with 3.1 million tonnes collected in 2022.
Great progress is being made but everyone has a role to play as the volumes of e-waste generated grow rapidly, says Ms. Charytanowicz.
Urging people to Join the E-Waste Hunt — Retrieve, Recycle and Revive — the WEEE Forum outlined the Five Ws of E-Waste recycling:
What:
Any product with a battery or plug.
Where:
WEEE Forum members’ collection points: weee-forum.org/members, or any other official e-waste collection point
Why:
According to GEM 2024 (UNITAR / ITU):
· 3.9 billion kg of aluminium
· 34 million kg of cobalt
· 28 million kg of antimony
Who: You
When: Now
Says Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau: “Almost 80% of the world’s population today own a mobile phone. Among them, there are those who have several devices, in some cases, each with its own type of chargers, cables and accessories. I call on everyone to ensure the proper recycling of these devices, which is key to reducing their environmental impact and minimizing resource scarcity.”
“We need to keep monitoring the development in the years to come, as the global rise of e-waste generation is outpacing the formal collection and recycling by five times since 2010,” said Kees Baldé, Senior Scientific Specialist at UNITAR SCYCLE, and a lead researcher behind the Global e-Waste Monitor.”
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International e-Waste Day (#ewasteday)
Last year, over 195 organisations from 55 countries supported the 6th International E-Waste Day observance. This year, the WEEE Forum invited all organisations involved in effective and responsible e-waste management to plan awareness-raising activities for 14 October. These range from social media, TV and radio campaigns to city or school e-waste collections or even artistic performances.
The WEEE Forum a.i.s.b.l. is an international association representing 51 producer responsibility organisations across the globe. Together with our members, we are at the forefront of turning the extended producer responsibility principle into an effective electronic waste management policy approach through our combined knowledge of the technical, business and operational aspects of collection, logistics, de-pollution, processing, preparing for reuse and reporting of e-waste. Our mission is to be the world’s foremost e-waste competence centre excelling in the implementation of the circularity principle.
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