You may have heard the term “e-waste” being used on the news recently and wondered like me: what is e-waste and why has it’s disposal become such an important topic? In this post, we’ll answer those questions as well as go through what you can do to reduce your environmental impact when it comes to responsibly disposing of electronic waste.

E-Waste is an informal name that describes electronic products that are meeting the end of their usefulness. This can include items such as old computers, TVs, VCRs, and copiers. The proper disposal of e-waste has recently become an important topic in the media as reports have come out that e-waste is often sent off to other countries, poisons the environment around it, and unnecessarily wastes precious metals. Recycling e-waste properly is a viable solution to this problem as it saves precious metals and prevents e-waste from taking space in landfills while hurting the environment around them. 

According to an assessment by the UN Environment Programme, when you dispose of e-waste, it is often shipped off to less developed countries in large quantities. Researchers also found that in many cases, women and children from these less developed countries improperly attempt to recycle e-waste without protective equipment. This exposes them to harmful materials like lead, cadmium, chromium, and brominated flame retardants. In addition, not recycling e-waste leads to more mining for precious metals like gold, copper, silver, palladium, iridium, lithium, and cobalt. For example, journalists from The Verge made the comparison that digging one ton of material in a gold mine gives approximately 5-6 grams of gold but the equivalent weight of cell phones has around 350 grams of salvageable gold! 

Although it may seem like you’ve heard it so many times, the three steps to limiting the impact of our e-waste really are reducing, reusing, and recycling. First, manufacturers should attempt to adopt more environmentally friendly materials. For example in 2017, researchers at Stanford University developed a biodegradable circuit board! As a consumer, you can determine which products are generally environmentally friendly through a certification by the Green Electronics Council called the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). It has standards for energy conservation, environmentally-friendly materials, and being easy to deconstruct for recycling. In addition to using environmental certifications, make sure you really will use an item before buying it! The next step to curtailing the effects of e-waste is reuse. If an electronic becomes unnecessary, never throw it away. Instead, try to either repurpose it in your home or donate it to charitable organizations that accept electronic products. If both of these choices are impossible or your electronics are broken and unfixable, send the e-waste to a responsible electronics recycler which you can find through various environmental organizations. For example, e-stewards certified centers either refurbish or responsibly recycle electronic waste and don’t export it to other countries.

Over time, taking small steps to reduce e-waste like we talked about in this post can really add up to preventing a large amount of environmental damage. I hope this post gave you some new information about what happens to your e-waste and how you can be a more environmentally friendly consumer. If you’d like to read more about this topic, here are the sources I used:

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/08/27/growing-e-waste-problem/

https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/electronics/whatisewaste

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-global-cost-of-electronic-waste/502019/

https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/cleaning-electronic-waste-e-waste

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/2/17270960/electronic-waste-urban-mining-materials-recycling

https://www.who.int/ceh/risks/ewaste/en/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(13)70020-2/fulltext

https://greenelectronicscouncil.org/epeat/registry/

https://green.harvard.edu/tools-resources/how/6-ways-minimize-your-e-waste

http://e-stewards.org/learn-more/for-consumers/