E-waste: Five billion phones will be thrown away by the end of 2022
Your phone will surely be dear to you and important to you regardless of whether it is a new iPhone model or a Nokia 3310 model. But do you know that by the end of 2022, around five billion mobile phones will be thrown away as electronic waste globally.
The World Organization for Electrical and Electronic Equipment Waste (WEEE) says that this year 5.3 billion mobile phones will not be recycled but will be thrown away as electrical waste.
This estimate, based on global trade data, highlights the growing environmental problem of ‘e-waste’.
Research has found that many people keep their old mobile phones instead of recycling them.
And the precious metals in these phones, such as the copper in the wires, and the cobalt in the rechargeable batteries, have to be mined for these minerals rather than being extracted and reused.
“People don’t realize that all these seemingly unusual items have a very high value and that collectively they represent a huge volume globally,” says WEEE Director General Pascal Leroy.
There are an estimated 16 billion mobile phones worldwide, and about a third of the mobile phones in Europe are no longer in use.
WEEE says its research has revealed that there is a mountain of electronic waste globally, from washing machines to toasters and from tablet computers to GPS devices, and by 2030 it will will increase to 74 million tons.
Earlier this year, the Royal Society of Chemistry launched a campaign to promote the use of precious metals from old equipment to make new products, highlighting global conflicts including the Ukraine war. This threatens the supply chain of precious metals.
“These old devices provide many important and valuable resources (metals) that can be used in the production of new electronic devices or other devices, such as wind turbines, electric car batteries,” says WEEE official Magdalena. Or solar panels. All of these are critical to the digital transition to low-carbon societies.”
Just over 17 percent of the world’s e-waste is properly recycled. But the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union has set a target of increasing it to 30 percent by next year.
This makes it clear that ‘it is one of the fastest-growing and most complex types of waste that affects both human health and the environment, as it may contain harmful substances.’
A survey by the organization Material Focus has revealed that there are more than one million unused but usable electrical appliances worth around £5.63 billion in UK homes.
It has also been calculated that the average household in the UK can sell up to £200 worth of unused electrical appliances.
The organization’s online awareness campaign also tells you where your nearest recycling plant is.
Pascal Leroy says much more can be done in this regard.
‘Providing collection boxes in supermarkets, picking up small broken appliances on new appliance deliveries and offering PO (post office) boxes to return small e-waste can encourage returns,’ he says. There are some measures introduced for this.
