International E-Waste Day: E-waste experts urge consumers to stop trashing electronic products with ordinary garbage

Consumers urged to collect dead and/or unused electronics and electrical products: give them a second life through reuse or repair, or recycle them properly

To mark the upcoming International E-Waste Day, October 14, consumers worldwide are urged to collect dead and/or unused electronics and electrical products and give them a second life through reuse or repair, or recycle them properly.

Above all: stop tossing them out in household waste bins.

The Global E-waste Monitor 2024, authored by UNITAR in cooperation with ITU, reported almost a quarter of end-of-life electronic waste ends up in home trash, squandering billions of dollars’ worth of copper, gold, and other precious metals, materials critical to the production of such products, along with valuable plastics, and glass.

The 14 million tonnes of e-waste (dead or unused products with a battery or plug) discarded with ordinary household waste equals the weight of ~24,000 of the world’s heaviest passenger aircraft – enough to form an unbroken queue of giant planes from London to Helsinki, NY to Miami, Cairo to Tripoli, or Bangkok to Calcutta.

Says Pascal Leroy, Director General of the Brussels-based Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum: “Small electronic and electrical goods such as mobile phones, toys, remote controls, game consoles, headphones, lamps, screens and monitors, heating and cooling equipment, and chargers are everywhere. And electronic components embedded in consumer products large and small – even clothing – are now omnipresent. The 844 million e-cigarettes thrown away in 2022 alone contained enough lithium, for example, to power 15,000 electric cars.”

Adds Magdalena Charytanowicz of the WEEE Forum in charge of International E-Waste Day: “We know what to do, and we can do better.”

Ms. Charytanowicz says the place to start is the junk drawer, a common feature of homes around the world.

Globally, there are 108 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people. Earlier surveys have shown that European households alone store about 700 million unused or non-functioning mobile phones – an average of more than two per household.

Why people hoard

She adds that “hoarding is an issue predominantly in wealthier countries. Elsewhere, reasons for keeping appliances are often personal data concerns or a desire to recover some of their value.”

A 2022 survey helped explain why so many EU households and businesses fail to bring WEEE in for repair or recycling.

Undertaken by WEEE Forum members – not-for-profit entities that collect e-waste from households and businesses on behalf of manufacturers, and consolidated by UNITAR’s Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme, the survey showed the average European household contains 74 e-products, such as phones, tablets, laptops, electric tools, hair dryers, toasters, and other appliances (excluding lamps). The survey sample included 8,775 households across a diverse group of European Union countries – Portugal, Netherlands, Italy, Romania, and Slovenia – combined with a UK survey, Of the 74 average total e-products, 13 were being hoarded (9 of them unused but working, 4 broken).

Kees Baldé, a senior scientist at UNITAR SCYCLE, warns that the global increase in e-waste generation has outpaced formal collection and recycling by five times since 2010.