Electronic waste

DEFINITION: Electronic equipment or parts of equipment discarded when broken or obsolete

As consumers replace outdated or broken electronic equipment or appliances, the old items are discarded, and many end up in landfills. These discarded electronic devices often contain hazardous materials that can leach into the environment.

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is generated when consumers discard broken or obsolete electronic equipment or parts of such equipment. Industrial waste that is produced during the manufacture of electronic equipment is also sometimes referred to as e-waste. Electronic waste raises environmental concerns because many electronic devices contain numerous heavy elements, such as lead and mercury, and other toxic elements, such as cadmium and arsenic. Additionally, some devices, such as smoke detectors, can include radioactive elements. Some electronic devices also contain plastics that have been treated with fire-retardant chemicals, many of which can be toxic when released into the environment.

Unlike the disposal of many other consumer products containing hazardous materials, the disposal of electronic devices did not receive regulatory attention until the early twenty-first century. When these devices were first introduced, they existed in limited quantity and were expensive. If such a device began to malfunction or stopped working, it would generally be repaired. By the late twentieth century, however, electronic devices such as computers, microwave ovens, televisions, and cell phones had become common and comparatively inexpensive. The cost of repairing a broken device was often comparable to or even more than the cost of simply replacing it.

The pace of technology, too, was such that newer devices often had more desirable features than older ones, and many consumers elected to replace broken electronics rather than repair them. Some manufacturers began to construct electronic devices that were nonserviceable—that is, they could not be repaired—so consumers would have to buy new ones when the old ones no longer worked. Manufacturers began to make some devices in which batteries could not be changed when they died; some sold devices to consumers with the knowledge that the devices would not function with later generations of the technology. Such planned obsolescence exacerbated the problem of electronic waste.

At first, most electronic waste simply ended up in landfills. However, by the 1990s, public awareness of the environmental hazards posed by electronic waste began to rise. Grassroots movements put pressure on governments and industry to curb the landfilling of electronic waste. In the United States in 2010, the administration of US president Barack Obama created the Interagency Task Force on Electronics Stewardship, which released the National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship the following year. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has laid out several key elements of sustainable electronics management. First, electronics should be reused whenever possible, including donation of used products to extend their lives. Electronics that cannot be reused or repaired should be recycled through authorized electronics recycling facilities. Finally, all purchases of new electronics should prioritize products designed with environmental considerations in mind. According to the National Center for Electronics Recycling, by 2011 twenty-five US states and the District of Columbia had passed laws designed to reduce electronic waste, generally by establishing recycling centers devoted to electronics or by requiring retailers or manufacturers to implement take-back programs for used electronics. Some states also banned electronic waste from entering landfills altogether.

However, even such efforts had limited impact. In a 2016 report, the EPA estimated that, compared to the total US consumer electronics generated in 2014, just 41.7 percent were recycled. Similarly, in 2018 the EPA estimated the recycling rate of consumer electronics in the United States at 38.5 percent. Internationally, rates have often been estimated to be even lower, even though some jurisdictions, such as the European Union, enacted considerably stricter regulations than the United States. For example, the Global E-Waste Monitor Report 2024 found that just 22.3 percent of the 62 million tonnes of e-waste produced in 2022 was recycled. While recycling efforts struggled to gain traction, the volume of electronic waste generated around the world had continued to increase steadily.

Electronic waste is difficult and expensive to recycle. Many electronic devices have materials in them that are valuable if recovered—such as lead, copper, and small amounts of gold, platinum, and silver—but recovering these materials is a labor-intensive process. For this reason, much of the electronic waste collected for recycling has been shipped to developing countries, where unskilled and poorly paid laborers break apart the devices to get to the commercially useful materials. Often, this work is done without the kind of oversight and regulation required by the environmental laws of industrialized nations, creating environmental hazards in those developing countries. China, in particular, had become an endpoint for much of the world's electronic waste by the mid-2010s.

International efforts to limit the environmental damage done by electronic waste have led some developing countries to limit imports of e-waste or to regulate its disposal, leaving developed nations with fewer options for disposing of their e-waste. (Though such regulations proved difficult to enforce and were often skirted by waste disposal companies.) Meanwhile, as consumer electronics became more and more ubiquitous through the 2010s and into the 2020s, nations such as China and India became leading contributors to e-waste as well as major collectors of such waste. International organizations such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and various environmental groups increasingly warned that the cycle of electronics consumption and disposal posed a major ecological threat, notably including direct health impacts on people involved in informal e-waste recycling.

Manufacturers and governments have sought ways to raise revenues to address the expensive process of recycling electronic waste. To handle the cost of electronic waste disposal, some companies charge fees to accept old electronics. California has legislated disposal fees that consumers must pay when they purchase certain new electronic devices. However, some studies have indicated that even purportedly environmentally friendly recycling programs often end up channeling e-waste into overseas landfills.

By the 2020s, electronic technology had only continued to advance, including through the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence software, and societal changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic had only made such technology even more crucial. Some experts stressed a need to increase electronic recycling and develop more efficient and safer means of extracting and reusing materials to meet demand amid decreasing raw resources.

Bibliography

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