INTERVIEWER: If you had to come up with a snappy headline
for this topic, what would it be?
We are drowning in a sea of e-waste, and that problem is only going to get bigger and bigger.
We are producing 50 million tonnes of e-waste every year and that could double by 2050.
Well this is the problem, right?
Perfectly good laptop.
Still works.
I could still write my stories on that.
But it's heavy.
It's cumbersome.
I don't want to carry this around everywhere.
Forget that.
That's more like it.
Circle of life continues.
Give that a couple of years I’ll want another one.
There's 60 different chemicals and metals in, you know, your standard electronic devices.
A lot of them hazardous.
The UK government estimates that 90 per cent of it ends up in landfill.
Burnt up.
Illegally traded.
This is not an optimal solution.
E-waste is inherently valuable.
More than a hundred countries have a GDP that’s smaller than the value that can be extracted
from e-waste, according to the United Nations.
Extracting all those chemicals and metals obviously is an industry in itself.
There’s one recycling company in China that is producing more cobalt out of old devices
than the country produces in its mines.
Some fashion houses, for instance, are now marketing themselves as only using gold for
their jewellery from e-waste.
I think I preferred the mobile phone myself.
There’s also a healthy second-hand market in the components themselves.
Of the office computers that get sold and carted away by professional companies, between
75 and 90 per cent of them get refurbished, sold on eBay.
The irony there is that the old-fashioned computer, the desktop, is actually a lot more
valuable for people retooling these things and reselling them.
They’re generally more powerful and they last a lot longer.
Laptops are a lot harder to resell because they're less durable and they wear out a lot
quicker.
On a global basis, recycling and reselling all those old computers and phones, it sounds
great, but on an individual level, you know, getting rid of old kit is not that easy.
Have you ever tried to actually sell or get rid of an old DVD player?
I mean, do you want this?
INTERVIEWER: No.
Point proved. This is e-waste, right?
INTERVIEWER: What needs to change?
The UN has set a target for 30 per cent of e-waste to be recycled by 2023, so that's
a step in the right direction.
More than 60 countries have already enacted legislation to deal with e-waste.
We are dematerialising.
We used to buy thousands of CDs and DVDs.
Now we're listening to Spotify and watching Netflix.
That in a way reduces the amount of hard waste and e-waste.
The thing that will have the most impact, as we're seeing in the consumer market, is
the consumer themselves.
If they demand better designs, more durable designs, things that will last longer and
don't succumb to just upgrading constantly, that could potentially have a huge impact
on reducing the amount of e-waste out there.