The United Nations this week said the world is throwing out nearly $10B of electronic waste—or e-waste—a year, calling it “invisible” because most people don’t know it can be recycled.
Most of it is lying around out of sight in our homes, including unused cables, electronic toys, power tools, vaping devices, and countless other small consumer items like electric toothbrushes, remote controls & speakers. The UN says it would weigh 9B kilograms or one-sixth of all e-waste worldwide.
Take electronic cables, a product I know only too well of course. 950M kgs of cables containing precious, easily recyclable copper were discarded last year – enough cable to circle the Earth 107 times!
But that’s just the tip of the rubbish heap really. Some 3.2B kgs—or 35% of ‘invisible e-waste’— are e-toys like talking dolls, biking computers & drones. 844M Vapes—which I hadn’t even thought about as electronic waste—are also discarded each year, weighing as much, the UN says, as six Eiffel Towers.
As with cables and copper, all this invisible electronic trash is a wasted resource that could be easily “mined” for re-use. In 2019 raw materials like copper, gold & lithium, to name just a few minerals, thrown out as global e-waste was estimated to be worth $57B, with 1/6th of that classed as invisible.
And we know how valuable that can be. In Europe alone demand for copper is forecast to rise 6 fold by 2030 to meet the needs of strategic sectors such as renewable energy, electric mobility and communications.
Recycling is getting better at least. In Europe, 55% of electric and electronic waste is now recycled, but the global average still drops to a little over 17%—and Australia is only marginally higher than that despite being the world’s 5th top e-waster.
This is a problem for everyone of course, but when we need the so-called green metals like copper so urgently its a problem we should all tackle together too.
Cheers, John Fennell