E-Waste
Every phone, laptop and appliance we upgrade has to go somewhere. Collectively, that "somewhere" now adds up to more discarded material, by weight, than any other waste category on Earth is growing — and most of it never gets properly recycled.
The 2024 Global E-waste Monitor, produced by the UN's International Telecommunication Union and UNITAR, recorded 62 million tonnes of electronic waste generated worldwide in 2022 — everything from mobile phones and laptops to refrigerators and solar panels reaching the end of their working life. That figure is projected to climb to roughly 82 million tonnes by 2030, growing faster than global recycling capacity can keep pace with.
Electronics have gotten cheaper, more disposable, and more central to daily life all at once. Shorter upgrade cycles, hard-to-repair designs (batteries glued in rather than screwed in, proprietary parts, software that discourages third-party repair) and rapidly falling prices all push in the same direction: replace rather than repair. Unlike food waste or even plastic packaging, e-waste is also uniquely hazardous — printed circuit boards, batteries and display screens contain lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants that require careful handling to avoid serious environmental and health harm.
Because formal recycling infrastructure is expensive to build and e-waste often contains recoverable gold, copper and other valuable metals, much of the world's discarded electronics ends up processed informally — frequently in lower-income countries, sometimes after being exported from wealthier ones despite international rules like the Basel Convention restricting hazardous waste shipments. Sites like Agbogbloshie in Ghana became internationally known for open-air electronics burning and acid processing used to extract metals, exposing workers — often including children — to toxic smoke and heavy metal contamination documented in multiple WHO and academic studies of the area's soil and residents.
Unlike some environmental problems, the technology to do this properly already exists — the gap is mostly economic and regulatory, not scientific. Formal e-waste recycling can recover gold, silver, copper and rare earth elements at concentrations often higher than freshly mined ore, a practice increasingly called "urban mining." The growing right-to-repair movement — which has led to new laws in the EU and several US states requiring manufacturers to make parts, tools and manuals available — directly targets the throwaway design that drives so much of this waste in the first place.
