what is e-waste?
Everything you need to know about e-waste.
Electronic devices continue to become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. While there are endless benefits such as connectivity and productivity, there are also many challenges.
e-waste is one of these.
Fast product life cycles, and limited options for recycling and reuse of electronic products, make e-waste the fastest growing type of waste globally with devastating environmental and health impacts.
With the rise of Web3 and its own contributions to the e-waste crisis, how might we harness these technologies for good, while reducing the impact to our environment?
What is e-waste?
Electronic devices have increasingly become part of our daily lives – laptops, mobile phones, tablets, printers, game consoles – anything with a battery or plug.
The average Australian household has approximately 17 electronic devices in their home. When these products stop working or are no longer required, they become e-waste.
e-waste is the fastest growing type of waste globally, with the UN’s Global e-waste Monitor noting a record 53.6 million metric tonnes (Mt) of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21 per cent in just five years and they predict it will reach 74 Mt by 2030, almost double in just 16 years.
The increasing volume of e-waste has been driven by higher consumption of electronics and electronic equipment, reliance on connectivity at work and at home, short product life cycles – think about how often the latest phone releases come out – along with limited options for repair.
Of the record amount of e-waste, only 17.4 per cent was collected and recycled meaning high value, recoverable materials contained within like copper, and conservatively valued at US $57 billion, was mostly dumped or burned.
Why is e-waste such a problem?
Currently countries like China, India, Pakistan,Vietnam, and Philippines handle 50 percent to 80 percent of the world’s e-waste.
Not only are valuable resources going to waste, there is most importantly a significant health and environmental hazard due to toxic chemicals polluting soil, air and water. This has highly harmful conseuqences to the environment and to humans. e-waste is also shipped overseas to countries that don’t have laws on handling and disposing of it.
This is captured in the 2018 documentary “Welcome to Sodom” that focuses on the world’s largest e-waste dump in the world in Ghana where toxins from e-waste have entered the food chain.
According to the World Health Organisation, more than 18 million children and adolescents are directly exposed to these e-waste dumps.
Furthermore, those core materials such as lead, silver and zinc will become increasingly scarce as soon as 2030 at the current rate, driving up cost but ultimately creating a business model that is not sustainable.
Not properly disposing of your electronic waste can also result in information theft from the hard drives in e-waste.
What is Web3 in relation to e-waste?
Now, why are we talking about Web3 here?
If you’re new to Web3 or unsure about how it works, it’s important to read up on “What is Web3” to ensure you understand the basics. Web3 is basically a version of the internet focused on ownership being decentralised, private and secure.
Coinbase breaks down the differences nicely:
Web1: Read-only
Web2: Read-write
Web3: Read-write-own
Blockchain is one of the key features of Web3, which is what enables the existence of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are some of the independent projects that make up Web3.
While Web3 presents unique opportunities and value creation driven by the decentralisation of business models and shift of power to users, it is not without fault.
One of the biggest critiques of Web3 is that it is, in its current state, terrible for the environment.
Bitcoin produces the “average of one whole MacBook Air of e-waste per economically meaningful transaction as miners’ cycle through quantities of short-lived computer hardware”.
How can Web3 help the e-waste crisis?
There are examples of Web3 technologies being harnessed to tackle e-waste, with companies such as Everledger using blockchain to create transparency and traceability with batteries. While these organizations are to be commended, there remains the fundamental issue of blockchain and cryptocurrencies being core contributors to e-waste. Until they replace the mining mechanisms, the issue remains.
There has been some movement on this front.
Traditionally, cryptocurrency transactions were verified through ‘proof of work’ to be added to the blockchain.
Proof of work, pioneered by Bitcoin, is where blockchains are secured and verified by virtual miners globally trying to be the first to solve a maths puzzle. While it supports a secure, decentralised blockchain, the processing power is energy intensive further adding to e-waste.
Proof of stake is becoming increasingly used, where generally people validate new transactions by staking their own cryptocurrency and earn a reward for doing so thus becoming far less resource intensive.
To read about why Australian businesses are uniquely placed to take advantage of the opportunities that will arise from Web3 check out this article here.
Consumer expectations towards business on this front have also grown, and businesses also need to take accountability and action as a core driver instead of placing responsibility at the foot of the customer. Employees are also demanding more of their employers.
Why is e-waste important to your business?
Consumer awareness has grown around this issue, and people are more and more concerned about climate change and acting in their own lives through recycling, upcycling, and reuse.
Their expectations towards business on this front have also grown, and businesses also need to take accountability and action as a core driver instead of placing responsibility at the foot of the customer. Employees are also demanding more of their employers.
Alongside this, many countries and regions are also creating regulations on e-waste which will impact business, an example being the state of Victoria, Australia banning e-waste from landfill in 2019.
Taking a proactive stance around e-waste is more and more critical to reduce business risk but also create a positive impact.
The ultimate way for businesses to reduce e-waste is to minimise in the first instance, followed by creating an e-waste plan including ensuring any e-waste is properly collected by a recognised provider for recycling and appropriate disposal as required.
Opportunities lie around harnessing blockchain to track the end-to-end lifecycle of electronic products and create more proactive interventions to reduce and recycle electronic products.
Alternatives to e-waste
Having an e-waste plan for disposal of e-waste is important. 88% of computers and TV’s purchased in Australia every year end up in landfill. In 2011, the Australian government introduced a national, industry funded recycling scheme to reduce landfill of old TVs and computers. However, less than 1% of TVs and around 10% of computers and laptops are recycled in Australia.
- Examples of alternatives to e-waste and ideas to minimise your environmental footprint include:
- Donating e-waste, you can get in touch with community groups such as Recycling Near You that will fix and donate it to local organizations and charities
- Having a “battery passport” for electric vehicles which helps recycling companies determine the health, location and condition of a battery
- In Australia, Recycle with Mobile Muster and the NTCRS who are partnered with your local Optus, Telstra, Vodafone and Officeworks store and accept all brands of mobile phones, chargers and accessories for recycling
- Re-purpose old equipment as universal remotes to control smart devices, play music and video or cast to compatible devices
- Buying green electronics that use less power while in use, use toxic-free components, are easy to disassemble for recycling and reduce unnecessary packaging. Check the Energy Rating label when buying a new appliance to save money and save energy.
Organizations like Greenpeace also track how the largest consumer electronics companies are managing their environmental impact for people wanting to verify their computer and smartphone brand’s green credentials.
Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics considers different criteria using publicly available information from each company. Company grades are derived by the following criteria weighting: Transparency (30%), Commitment (30%), Performance (30%), and Advocacy (10%) across areas such as:
- greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption of their own operations, and product supply chain
- amount and source of material resources used to manufacture their main products
- efforts to reduce dangerous chemicals in products and manufacturing process chemicals within supplier factories
While no companies achieved the top grade of A, the two companies that ranked the most highly with a grade of B include Fairphone and Apple.
Conclusion:
e-waste presents a rapidly increasing challenge with significant impacts.
Not only do consumers need to evaluate their relationships with electrical products, how we use, consume, and dispose of them, but it is essential that business steps up to the plate and examine their contributions, and how they can mitigate the impacts.
Changing consumer expectations demand it.
For those businesses that can harness opportunities enabled via Web3 in a considered manner, will uncover new avenues of growth.
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