E-waste in landfill contaminates soil and groundwater, putting food supply systems and water sources at risk. The Recycling Economic Information (REI) Report found that, in a single year, recycling and reuse activities in the United States accounted for 757,000 jobs, $36.6 billion in wages and $6.7 billion in tax revenues. Its the same route Puckett is taking now. Total Reclaim was a founding member. Recycling rates by country - Wikipedia Planet Aid - For the Environment, For People The requirements of certification stipulate that no hazardous, illegal e-waste will be exported to developing nations, be disposed into landfills, or recycled using forced or child labor.. Number of cars taken off the road/year was calculated using the Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator, updated March 2020. For starters, more countries need to enact responsible e-waste legislation. Numbers in parentheses indicate a reduction in either greenhouse gases or vehicles, and therefore represent environmental benefits. In 2018, 34.6 million tons of MSW were combusted with energy recovery. 11 Facts About E-Waste | DoSomething.org The Environmental Protection Agency has a rule that aims to prevent export of CRT monitors, the boxy computer and TV monitors that were have been out of production since flat-screen technology drove them out of the market nearly a decade ago. With the reauthorization of the farm bill next year, we have a chance to shift the U.S. agricultural system from a climate problem to a climate solution. The recycling rate grew more slowly over the last few years. But a two-year investigation by the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based e-waste watchdog group, concluded that sometimes businesses are exporting electronics rather than recycling them. The company declined to disclose those partners., 5. Photo by Katie Campbell, KCTS9/EarthFix. Plastics and metals from dismantled electronics await their turn to enter a machine that shreds and sorts them into commodity type. Other materials accounted for less than 10 percent each. The International Telecommunication Union, one of the groups behind the publication of the Global E-waste Monitor 2020, has set a target of getting 50 percent of the worlds nations to enact such legislation by 2023which would mean getting the current number up from 78 to 97 over the next three years. Su talks to the workers and finds out many are migrants from mainland China, who are residing in Hong Kong without the official documents required for them to legally be there, she says. Electronics manufacturers pay a fee to the state on electronics sold locally. Over time, recycling and composting rates have increased from just over 6 percent of MSW generated in 1960 to about 10 percent in 1980, to 16 percent in 1990, to about 29 percent in 2000, and to about 35 percent in 2017. We explore how e-waste recycling is done and why we should focus on scaling it up . In new research, we found that Europe has the highest collection and recycling rate, covering about 42.5% of the total e-waste generated in 2019. People stuck at home are de-cluttering, and because of the lockdowns there are few workers collecting and recycling the junk, Kees Balde, a senior program officer with the sustainable cycles program at the United Nations University, another contributor to the report, told Reuters. Estimates of U.S. e-waste exports vary widely. What is E-Waste Recycling and How Is it Done? | Earth.Org Due to a change in methodology, there was an increase in the wasted food generation estimate between 2017 and 2018, which resulted in a lower composting rate even though the tons composted remained the same from 2017 to 2018. As the report notes, hiding inside all of that unrecycled e-waste is also $57 billion worth of recoverable gold, silver, platinum, and other precious metals. They follow a set of GPS coordinates for one of the tracked electronics. He said he hopes it doesnt take another 20 to end it. Then they went to the Port of Seattle, across the Pacific Ocean to the Port of Hong Kong and ultimately to two junkyards in the New Territories. Puckett turned to GPS tracking technology as a new tool to determine just how big the e-waste export problem really might be. Once theyre obsolete and discarded, these products can end up accumulating in the environment, polluting habitats and harming people and wildlife. The generation of office-type (high grade) papers also has been in decline, due at least partially to activities such as the increased use of the electronic transmission of reports. This time, over 80% of participants understood that preventing waste was much better than recycling. That doesnt surprise Jackson Lau, director of the Hong Kong Recycle Materials and Reproduction Business General Association. How do consumers feel about e-waste, and how does it affect their behavior? Here's why. Of the MSW generated, approximately 69 million tons were recycled and 25 million tons were composted. The amount of MSW combusted with energy recovery was 34.6 million tons, while the amount of MSW sent to landfills was 146.2 million tons. That's equivalent to discarding about 70 mobile phones per person in Singapore! The new investment is expected to leverage over $13 million in additional co-financing from the private sector. A 2018 New York Times Magazine article depicted backyard recyclers in India, Indonesia, and Thailand who tried to recover the gold inside circuit boards by bathing them in nitric and hydrochloric acid, or by literally cooking e-waste in stoves to get at the valuable metals hidden inside the plastic, wires, and circuitry, with no protection against the emissions. Many of these workers are children, who typically receive the lowest feesas low as three dollars a dayand who often work without goggles, gloves, or other safety equipment. The results showed that some of those exported electronics had been dropped off at green-certified recyclers. The rate of yard trimmings composted in 2018 was 63 percent (22.3 million tons), down from 69.4 percent (24.4 million tons) in 2017. Su pounds on the front gate, and the drilling stops. In 2018, 17.7 million tons of food (28.1 percent of generation of wasted food) was managed through animal feed, co-digestion/anaerobic digestion, bio-based materials/biochemical processing, donation, land application and sewer/wastewater treatment. The e-waste produced annually is worth over $62.5 billion, more than the GDP of most countries. In 2018, about 146.1 million tons of MSW were landfilled. Pressure is growing on tech companies to do away with their strategies of planned obsolescence and to make it easier for electronics consumers to repair their older devices instead of tossing them out. Electronic waste or e-waste in the United States refers to electronic products that have reached the end of their operable lives, and the United States is beginning to address its waste problems with regulations at a state and federal level. How are other companies and countries tackling e-waste? Collectively, these products accounted for 90 percent of total MSW recycling in 2018. Generation decreased 1 percent between 2005 and 2010, followed by a rise in generation of 7 percent from 2010 to 2017. A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda. Right now, just over half of U.S. states have laws on the books regulating the disposal of e-waste, but there is currently no federal law requiring it to be recycled or prohibiting it from being exported to developing countries, even though such legislation has been proposed repeatedly over the years. I really hope that our land has not been contaminated, Cheung said. EPA refers to trash, or MSW, as various items consumers throw away after they are used. Goodwill Industries International is committed to understanding new insights into the e-cycling space from the final report, the statement said, and encourages Goodwill organizations participating in the Dell Reconnect program to evaluate the continuation of their contracts with Dell and to take steps to ensure that electronics are responsibly recycled. Our stuff was over there, Lorch said. In a phone interview, co-owner Craig Lorch acknowledged that some of Total Reclaims LCD flatscreen monitors have been shipped to Hong Kong, despite the companys no-export policy. Using our Core survey and Zeitgeist data from October 2021 we set out to answer some key questions, including: Why has e-waste become such an issue? By 2019, approximately 53.6 million metric tons was produced. The world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic and electrical waste (e-waste) a year, weighing more than all of the commercial airliners ever made. You see this kind of global e-waste flow that actually almost covered the whole planet., A pile of printer parts dusted with toners like carbon black, a possible carcinogen known to cause respiratory problems. But since only 17.4% of 2019s e-waste was collected and recycled, just US$10 billion of this was recovered in an environmentally responsible way. There is over 347 Mt of unrecycled e-waste on earth in 2023. This makes e-waste the worlds fastest-growing domestic waste stream, they write, fueled mainly by higher consumption rates of electric and electronic equipment, short life cycles, and few options for repair.. In Seelampur, the maze of filthy lanesis filled with scrap shops where thousands of people work, picking apart whatever is salvageable from the junk gathered from across north India. Americans send about 50,000 dump trucks worth of electronics to recyclers each year. Because electronic waste contains a variety of materials, including plastics, glass, and metals, recycling e-waste requires several steps to recover these resources in the most efficient manner. Check out our Reduce, Reuse, Recycle web area for more information on recycling. Dongxia Su and Jim Puckett peek over the fence of an e-waste scrapyard in the New Territories of Hong Kong. In 2002, the Basel Action Networks Jim Puckett tests the water quality near Guiyu, China, where residents cooked electronics to extract precious metals and dumped the leftovers in a nearby river. Courtesy of Cheung Choi. Across the river from theRed Fort in Delhi, India, the grim neighbourhood of Seelampur lives off what consumers in the modern world throw away their broken or obsolete electronic and electrical goods. EPA began collecting and reporting data on the generation and disposition of waste in the United States more than 35 years ago. This section shows those GHG reduction environmental benefits. Last May Pucketts team dropped two non-working LCD TVs, with tracking devices placed inside, at separate recyclers in Oregon. Yard trimmings comprised the next largest material category, estimated at 35.4 million tons, or 12.1 percent of total generation, in 2018. At 59 Million Tons, Our E-Waste Problem Is Getting Out of Control - NRDC In high income countries, around 8% of e-waste is thought to be discarded in waste bins, while 7%-20% is exported. In 2018, the rate of food and other MSW organics composting was 4.1 percent (2.6 million tons). Pucketts documentary came out more than a decade after nearly every developed nation on the globe had ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty to stop developed countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer nations. How much e-waste was produced in 2016? According to the report, only 17.4 percent of the worlds e-waste in 2019 was documented, collected, and recycled properlyleaving more than 82 percent of it essentially unaccounted for. 0.42 pounds per person per day for composting. Their clothes are dusted black with toner ink, a probable carcinogen known to cause respiratory problems. The rate of yard trimmings composted in 2000 was 51.7 percent . About the UN E-Waste Coalition Secure .gov websites use HTTPS E-waste is unique among the many rivulets making up our larger waste stream. e-waste continues. The lightest phone you can find today weighs in at just over three ounces, less than a deck of playing cards. Photo by Ken Christensen, KCTS9/EarthFix. We need to step up enforcement to match the certification programs we have.. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. *Includes material from residential, commercial and institutional sources (except not industrial process waste). Growth in the recycling rate was significant over the next 15 years, spanning until 2005. Generation of yard trimmings and food waste has increased since 2000. These management pathways include animal feed, codigestion/anaerobic digestion, bio-based materials/biochemical processing, donation, land application and sewer/wastewater treatment. Workers are breaking them. The UK is one of the largest producers of e-waste in the world, with 23.9kg of e-waste on average produced per head, according to the Environmental Audit Committee's Electronic Waste and the Circular Economy report - that's almost a third of an adult's average body weight, which stands at 70.8 kg. Some of the Goodwill locations in the Dell Reconnect program dismantle electronics. 3. Goodwills public relations official declined requests for an interview and instead issued a statement Friday after Puckett briefed officials about the findings of his groups investigation. Recycling more is a worthy goal for homeowners, businesses and communities. Now I do not even dare drink water from the well.. Courtesy of the Basel Action Network, The trackers are like miniature cell phones, he said. Paper and paperboard products have ranged between 28.4 and 23.1 percent of generation since 2010. Durable Goods: Product-Specific Data | US EPA When I was young, I used to drink water directly from the river, he said through an interpreter. Little orange markers dot a satellite image. Over the years Pucketts attempts to quantify and draw attention to exported electronic waste has drawn criticism from U.S. recyclers who say the problem has been exaggerated. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Together these three countries accounted for nearly 38 per cent of the world's e-waste last year. . The waste electrical and electronic equipment forum (WEEE) recycles e-waste, avoiding 2 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of waste. How to Recycle Old Electronics - Consumer Reports Harris, from the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, said those falling commodity prices have put many companies in trouble. For their part, businesses, organizations, and individuals that routinely need to dispose of their old electronics can choose recyclers who have signed on to the e-Stewards Initiative, a program that certifies recyclers according to the highest standards for responsible practices. Included in the generation number are the almost 94 million tons of MSW recycled and composted and an additional 17.7 million tons of other food management in 2018. The amount of MSW combusted with energy recovery increased from zero in 1960 to 14 percent in 1990. The hierarchy ranks the various management strategies from most to least environmentally preferred. His eyes are fixed on the glowing screen of his laptop. E-waste recycling. Fine. Our bright yellow boxes can be found across many major . Phones, radios, toys, laptops if it has a power or battery supply its likely to join a growing mountain of e-waste after use. Source: WARM model Version 15. But growing global demand is outpacing our capacity to recycle or dispose of electronic products safely. Transforming our food systems: Feeding the world while nourishing the planet, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Download the A New Circular Vision for Global Electronics report here, Dark skies, bright future: overcoming Nigerias e-waste epidemic, Turning e-waste into gold: the untapped potential of African landfills, Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, UN report: Time to seize opportunity, tackle challenge of e-waste. Credits Illustrations UNU/UNITAR SCYCLE -Nienke Hacco, Credits Photos UNU/UNITAR SCYCLE -Yassyn Sidki. 1. Having separate containers for different types of waste will help. This number is expected to increase with greater spending power and new technologies constantly replacing old ones. 17 Shocking E-Waste Statistics In 2023 - The Roundup Check out Food: Material-Specific Data. Trash & Recycling Drop-Off Locations. Save the planet. The U.S. Recycling System | US EPA The total generation of municipal solid waste (MSW) in 2018 was 292.4 million tons (U.S. short tons, unless specified) or 4.9 pounds per person per day. E-waste doesnt just pose a health risk though. E-Waste Offers an Economic Opportunity as Well as Toxicity Cheung Kwai Choi, a farmer who has lived in the region for a half-century, said the e-waste junkyards and fires have multiplied in recent years. Estonia, Norway, and Iceland have the highest e-waste recycling rates. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 167,900 academics and researchers from 4,669 institutions. "Neg." Many U.S. consumers got their first glimpse of what happens to their discarded electronics in Pucketts 2001 film Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. It captured the crude recycling methods taking place in Guiyu, a cluster of villages in southeastern China that has since become known as the worlds biggest graveyard for Americas electronic junk. It is hosted by the World Economic Forum. Details might not add to totals due to rounding. The recycling and composting rates (as a percentage of generation) of the below materials in MSW has mostly increased over the last 58 years. For more information on food management, check out Food: Material-Specific Data. MMTCO2E is million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. So whats to be done? The UN E-waste coalition is a group of seven UN agencies who have come together to increase collaboration, build partnerships and more efficiently provide support to Member States to address the e-waste challenge. Generation of MSW increased (except in recession years) from 88.1 million tons in 1960 to 292.4 million tons in 2018. 0.30 pounds per person per day for other food management. China, the US, and India produce the most e-waste. This equates to 1.57 jobs, $76,000 in wages and $14,101 in tax revenues for every 1,000 tons of material recycled. The same chemicals and metals that allow our electronics to work so smoothly and quicklyamong them mercury, cadmium, and leadare highly toxic when consumed or absorbed into bloodstreams.