E-waste is the Toxic Legacy of our Digital Age
Our waste electronics are polluting drinking water and harming ecosystems around the world. It’s time to fix the problem.
![]() 1.6 billioncell phones manufactured in 2012. Electronics are packed with toxic chemicals—arsenic, lead, and poly-brominated flame retardants. |
![]() 18 monthsThat’s how short the average American keeps a cell phone. |
![]() 60% wastedMost of our e-waste ends up in landfills—both at home and in the developing world—where toxic metals leach into the environment. |
![]() 30% lostEven when recycled, a significant amount of electronic material cannot be recovered |
We need to make the products we already
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We’re throwing
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At the same
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There aren’t
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If we fixed things instead,
we’d create thousands of skilled jobs and give poor communities around the world access to low-cost technology.

We make a lot of e-waste.
When electronics end up in landfills, toxics like lead, mercury, and cadmium leach into the soil and water.
The electronic waste problem is huge: More than 20 million tons of e-waste are produced every year. Americans alone generate about 3.4 million tons of e-waste per year. If you put every blue whale alive today on one side of a scale and one year of US e-waste on the other, the e-waste would be heavier.
E-waste is global.
Some e-waste is shipped overseas, where it is burned for scrap by kids in junkyards. We visited a scrapyard in Accra, Ghana and met some really good kids in a bad situation. They didn’t know how toxic their job really is.
Even so, when we are encouraging a global market for used electronics it does a lot more good than harm:
- Repaired electronics give people access to low-cost electronics and help them access the awesome benefits of technology
- Used electronics create repair jobs in developing countries that often have few opportunities for skilled labor
- Reuse in developing countries is usually more effective than domestic recycling—there’s not much of a market for old cathode ray tube monitors in the US, for example, but they are reused in other countries.
Global consumption of electronics is increasing. Every year we create more e-waste than before. At least 50% of Africa’s e-waste comes from within the continent. China discards 160 million electronic devices a year.
We create too much e-waste and reuse way too little.
It’s time to fix the e-waste problem.
We need more e-waste repair and refurbishment, worldwide. We need to take a page from the book of expert repair folks in developing countries and reuse every part we possibly can. We need to stop throwing away computers that could be fixed with a 25-cent part.
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