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E-Waste: World’s Manufacturing and Consumption Cycle of Electronics is Unsustainable
Electronic and Digital waste are incredibly important but seldom discussed back-of-mind issues. They are the side effects of a world obsessed with electronic gadgets and virtual lives.
Aaron Blum, the CEO of ERI, told Time magazine that “in our society, we always have to have the new, best product When we buy something new, we get rid of what’s old. That consumption cycle has made electronics waste the world’s fastest-growing solid-waste stream.” The United Nations has called the problem a “tsunami of e-waste“.
The world produces more than 50 million tons of e-waste every year, and the raw materials locked up in that waste amounts to more than $62 billion, more than the GDP of more than 120 of the world’s countries. And estimates are that only 20-30 percent of this waste is recycled.
The problem of disposing of waste consisting of old electronic devices is only one side of the problem. To make matters worse, the manufacturing of electronic products also consumes and contaminates massive amounts of water. The manufacture of a smartphone can use as much as 14,000 liters of water and the manufacture of a laptop could use 190,000 liters of water.
Josh Lepawsky, an expert in digital material use, said that “something that does set digital technologies apart in terms of their energy and material footprints from more traditional manufacturing is that to get the purity of the materials you need to make things like semiconductors (which) requires substantially more energy and material inputs in terms of purifying those materials. To get that type of purity requires massive amounts of energy and resources. So, there are heavy consequences for manufacturing these devices.”
