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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