Consumers worldwide are urged to collect dead and/or unused electronics and electrical products and give them a second life through reuse or repair, or recycle them properly.
Above all: stop tossing them in household waste bins.
The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (authored by UNITAR in cooperation with ITU), reported almost a quarter of end-of-life electronic waste ends up in home trash, squandering billions of dollars’ worth of copper, gold and other precious metals, materials critical to the production of such products, along with valuable plastics and glass.
That’s 14 million tons of e-waste (dead or unused products with a battery or plug) discarded with ordinary household waste. That much e-waste works out to the weight of ~24,000 of the world’s heaviest passenger aircraft – enough to form an unbroken queue of giant planes from London to Helsinki, New York to Miami, Cairo to Tripoli, or Bangkok to Calcutta.
According to Pascal Leroy, director general of the Brussels-based Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, the organization behind International E-Waste Day: “Small electronic and electrical goods such as mobile phones, toys, remote controls, game consoles, headphones, lamps, screens and monitors, heating and cooling equipment, and chargers are everywhere. And electronic components embedded in consumer products large and small – even clothing – are now omnipresent. According to UNITAR and ITU, the 844 million e-cigarettes thrown away in 2022 alone contained enough lithium, for example, to power 15,000 electric cars.”
Published December 2024
