A look around a reporter’s desk turns up eight items that will end up as e-waste one day: a printer, keyboard, computer screen, laptop, mouse, and phone charger, as well as mobile and landline phones. And a swivel of the desk chair brings into view a digital camera, television, and cable TV box.
E-waste is an informal name for what is also called waste electrical and electronic equipment, or WEEE for short. It encompasses any household or office item at the end of its useful life that has circuitry inside, or electrical components drawing on a battery or power supply. Beyond the things in an office, e-waste denotes refrigerators, toasters, washing machines, stereo systems, electric toothbrushes, and the sort of toys that do things on their own.
Worldwide, people threw away about 49 million tons of such stuff in 2016 – about 13 pounds for each inhabitant of the Earth. By 2021 that figure will have risen to more than 57 million tons, according to a study led by the United Nations University (UNU). It’s going up because more and more people can afford mobile phones and other electronic doodads and also because products do not last as long as they used to.
At the moment, only 20 percent of global e-waste is properly recycled and documented as such, says Pascal Leroy, head of the WEEE Forum in Brussels, an umbrella group for European producers and recyclers of e-waste. Nobody has a clear idea of what happens to the other 80 percent, though it is probably dumped, traded, or recycled dangerously in a developing country.