e-waste mountains

Ipad, Ipod, Blackberry; they are just a few names out of the gamma of electronic appliances that we can find in the shops nowadays. In the Western world, fridges, laptops & computers, printers, televisions and mobile phones have become daily life objects. In developing countries like China and India, they are moving in the same direction. Also in Africa and Latin-America, a sharp increase in the use of electronics is noticed.

As the UN report "Recycling - from e-waste to resources" (2009) indicates, the amount of e-waste is growing steadily, and will continue to grow even faster in the future:

• Global e-waste generation is growing by about 40 million tons a year
• Globally, more than 1 billion mobile phones were sold in 2007, up from 896 million in 2006
• Countries like Senegal and Uganda can expect e-waste flows from PCs alone to increase 4 to 8-fold by 2020.
• In South Africa and China, by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500% in India.
• By 2020, in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher.

Those electric appliances are made of several different materials , also valuable ones such as gold and silver. Due to this mix of materials, recycling requires a certain amount of technical knowledge, and state-of-the-art process factories:

• Manufacturing mobile phones and personal computers consumes 3 per cent of the gold and silver mined worldwide each year; 13 per cent of the palladium and 15 per cent of cobalt.
• Modern electronics contain up to 60 different elements - many valuable, some hazardous, and some both.

An important step is in the recycling process is the waste collection , an activity that has to be started from scratch in most developing countries. Price increases of the materials used in the appliances will encourage recycling, even in the developing countries, where the recycling infrastructure still has to be build (or at least for a large part). Action will be required, otherwise we'll evolve towards a Wall-E scenario, with hazardous e-waste mountains.