I was interested to read some blatant misinformation in a recent article from Earth911 that 99% of all e-waste is recycled.
Because according to the US EPA only 12.5% of disposed e-waste is recycled (Municipal Solid Waste In the United States, 2005 Facts and Figures, October 2006). And for good reason - 87.5% of it is non-recyclable!
Only 12.5% of the consumer electronic products bought were “recovered” in 2005. This compares with an average recovery rate of 32.1% for all other categories
Important Fact about E-Waste and Recycling that the green coalition of electronics manufacturers don’t want you to read.
These are quantifiable statistics concerning the issues of electronic waste and the ongoing e-waste recycling methods currently deployed. All facts and figures are backed by source and where possible I have made a link to the original data. These facts and figures were originally compiled for both legislators as well as advocates of environmental policy studies. Since its compelation in 2006, the statistics have been updated where possible. This list will be updated as new statistics are released.
Research includes Facts and figures from the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (2006) last updated in June 2008
What is the latest estimates of E-waste expansion globally?
The estimated amount of extra e-waste created each year is 400 million units
At the current growth rates 3-4 billion units will be scrapped from now until 2010. This equated to an average of 400 million units plus a year. (International Association of Electronics Recyclers 2006)
More than 130,000 computers are trashed EACH DAY in the USA
Today, this estimate is more like 250,000. This previous estimate was drawn up by Gartner in 2003.
In their Electronics Recovery Recycling Baseline Report in 1999, the National Safety Council predicted that there could be up to 500 million obsolete computers in the US by 2005. This estimate has been confimred by Gartners findings in 2005.
More than 20 million computers and televisions are added to home storage each year.
This means that a huge amount of e-waste is out there but currently being stored in people’s homes.
According to the EPA about 57 million PCs and TVs are bought by households and businesses each year in the United States. These don’t necessarily replace the older versions of the same electronic. This is particularly true with products such as Cellphones which notoriously stay in a bottom draw for some years. Consumers (both business and household) frequently store their retired products.
Experts agree that the average home will be hoarding three or more units somewhere in their home. However, this figure is much bigger with businesses holding older computers. Up to 24 million TVs and PCs are added to their storage each year. This storing or hoarding is predicted to accelerate thanks to new Plasma and LCD TVs. New digital broadcasting are likely to negate any resale value old TVs might have.
Cell phones
Over 130 million mobile phones or cell phones are trashes each year (USA)
This equates to more than 2.5 million tons of e-waste (2005)
And contrary to figures published by the industry, nearly 90% of this waste in irreclaimable.
2.6 million tons of e-waste was generated in 2005, and the EPA notes that only 12.6% was recycled:
As in recent previous updates of this report, generation of selected consumer electronic products was estimated as a subset of miscellaneous durable goods. In 2005, an estimated 2.6 million tons of these goods were generated. Of this, approximately 330,000 tons of selected consumer electronics were recovered for recycling. Selected consumer electronics include products such as TVs, VCRs, DVD players, video cameras, stereo systems, telephones, and computer equipment.“
Each year up to 50 million tons of e-waste get dumped
Some 20 to 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste are generated worldwide every year, comprising more than 5% of all municipal solid waste. When the millions of computers purchased around the world every year (183 million in 2004) become obsolete they leave behind lead, cadmium, mercury and other hazardous wastes. In the US alone, some 14 to 20 million PCs are thrown out every year. In the EU the volume of e-waste is expected to increase by 3 to 5 per cent a year. Developing countries are expected to triple their output of e-waste by 2010.
E-waste is the fastest rising waste stream in the US
The amount of consumer electronic actually rose by 8% from 2004 to 2005 to 2.63 million tons, a higher rate than any other category of waste. This is at a time when all other sources of waste are falling.
Location and Numbers of Old Electronics
How Much Electronic Waste Gets Recycled or Stockpiled?
Only 12.5% of disposed e-waste is recycled
Only 12.5% of the consumer electronic products bought were “recovered” in 2005. This compares with an average recovery rate of 32.1% for all other categories
68% of consumers stockpile
“68 percent of American stockpile their old computer equipment at home.”
9% of all products sold between 1980 and 2004 are still in storage
Source: EPA “Electronics Waste Management in the US: Preliminary Findings. Presentation by Clare Lindsay, U.S. EPA, Office of Solid Waste to the E-Scrap Conference in Austin, TX, October 18, 2006. These are preliminary numbers (still under review) to be presented in a final report by the EPA in 2007.
Of all products sold between 1980-2004, almost half are still in use either by the first or subsequent owners.
• About 42 percent have already been managed via recycling or disposal.
• 9 percent are being stores or hoarded
• Half of these are TVs
• A quarter of these are PCs
• A little over 20% percent were re-used by a second owner.
Sales of Electronics
a. Sales in Computing
In 2007 worldwide computer sales reached 260 million. Over 67 million were bought in the US.
267.7 million computers were sold globally in 2007, up 32 million from 2006 (IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker). 67 million of these were sold in the USA. These include Desktops, Notebooks, Laptops, Ultra Portables or Mobile Computers and x86 Servers. This oes not include hand helds such as PDAs.
An estimated 430 million computers will be sold in 2012
This year, in 2008, it is estimated by industry analysts that over 300 million computers will be bought, with over 70 million going to the US. This will increase to 430 million by 2012,(85 million in the US)
b. Sales of TVs
This year we bought 3.9 MILLION TVs for the SUPERBOWL alone!
National Retail Federation says we’ll be purchasing 4 million TVs just for this year’s 2008 SUPERBOWL. That’s up more than 50% from last year. In 2006 in the same period we bought 1.7 million.
In 2008 32 million digital TVs wil be sold in the US
As of December 2007 over 50% of US households now own a digital television. (The Consumer Electronics Association)
In 2007 $25 manufacturers made BILLION on digital TVs in the US.
According to new CEA sales projections, manufacturers are expected to announce an average of 11 percent revenue growth in excess of $25 billion in 2007 from digital TV sales. Additional rises of 13 percent revenue and 17 percent unit sales increase is estimated for 2008 (CEA).
Global TV sales in excess of 50 million a year
TV sales reached 50.6 million units per year (Q4 2006 to Q3 2007). TV revenues were over $26 billion for that period.
83% of 50”+ screens are sold to the US
c. Sales of cell phone or mobiles
Globally over one billion cell phones were sold in 2006
A new milestone was reached in 2006, with over one billion cellphones shipped and sold that year. (IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker). That’s a 22.5% rise from 2005
By 2008, cell phone usage is expected to reach two billion (UN).
In the US the amount of cell phone subscribers increased from 340,000 in 1985 to 180 million in 2004. Globally, cell phone sales have increased from 100 million units in 1997 to 780 million units in 2005.
Cell phone sales are projected to exceed 1 billion units per year in 2009, with an estimated 2.6 billion cell phones in use by the end of that year (USGS).
We purchased more than $160 BILLION consumer electronics in 2005
“15 percent of this spend was made online (CE) a jump of 5% from 2004, according to a study released today by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)®. “
Global consumer electronics sales was $618 BILLION in 2005
What is recoverable from recycling consumer electronics?
Gold:
One ton of e-waste from PCs has more gold in it than 17 t of gold ore.
Resources Used in Electronics Manufacturing
It takes 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals and 1.5 tons of water to produce 1 single PC with its monitor
The UN study found that making a PC and monitor uses 240 kg (530 pounds) of fossil fuel, 22 kg (48 pounds) of chemicals and 1.5 tonnes of water. This is more than the weight of a rhinoceros or a car (Kuehr and Williams, 2003). Making consumer electronics is an extreme burden not only on the environment but also on the demand for fossil fuels. This far exceeds any other household or business product.
Does reusing and re-selling pre-owned computers create more jobs than disposal?
WALL-E is one of the better animations to come out of the Disney Pixar creative collaboration.
It’s a heart warming tale of WALL-E, a Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class unit. The lovable robot manages to stay functional after 700 years of service by recycling bits of other WALL-E robots which have perished over the centuries of cleaning up the Earth.
A thousand years earlier in the 21st Century, the Buy ‘N’ Large corporation had (miraculously) taken over every single service on Earth, including the government. They are to blame for the rampant over production and subsequent pollution that ensues - turning Earth into a wasteland of e-waste and junk - void of humans, who generations later, remain living lethargically on a space cruiser many light years away.
The Buy ‘N’ Large corporation is a more acceptable bad guy to portray than the dozens of consumer brands who benefit from today’s throw away society.
A more realistic landscape (the one we see today in Asia) would be the mountains of e-waste filled with broken Sony plasma screens, Panasonic DVD players and colored iPod shells. This later imagery would never have gotten passed Disney’s largest stock holder.
The real message to be taken from this summer’s No. 1 blockbuster is that most of what makes up e-waste today is non recyclable and has absolutely nowhere to go.
only about 12% of the e-waste we produce is recycled. The rest will joint the mountains of e-waste which one day might challenge the Himalayas.
We see the pictures of Chinese villagers picking their way through circuit boards and recovering the poisonous alloys and by-product, but this only makes up about 12% of the junk that we ship to them. The rest stays strewn across the countryside on e-waste dumps which closely resemble the make believe ones depicted in WALL-E.
If the electronics we produce today are largely non recyclable, why is the drive towards recycling them so prevalent, when a drive to re-use them or make them last longer goes relatively unheard?
So long as the green back is more powerful than the green lobby, more funds will be driven towards green perception than green reality - The burying of the National Computer Recycling Act is testament to this. Only when every bit of electronics is recyclable (and this includes Xbox, Playstation, Wii too) will we be able to start slowing the acceleration of e-waste dumping.
Until the Utopian vision of green electronics magically appears - which will be decades away at best - consumers need to look at other ways to lower the rising tide of e-waste: Buy a pre-owned or used computer, digital camera, cell phone or any electronics device when you can.
When you buy something new you add to the e-waste pile - when you buy used you don’t.
Sell pre-owned or used as well. If you don’t use your old computer, DVD player, cell phone, digital camera or camcorder any more, trade it in or sell it pre-owned or used so that someone else will buy it from you instead of buying it new and adding to e-waste themselves.
For additional trust, buy used off of a pre-owned retailer who is willing to give a one year warranty on your purchase. That way, you have as much confidence as buying new.
With companies like trade 2 save launching to give consumers more confidence in the pre-owned and used consumer electronics market, we hope that more consumers will take matters into their own hands and prevent the e-waste catastrophe so beautifully animated in WALL-E.
For those of us who don’t enjoy the eBay experience and just want to trade-in our old laptops for an upgrade, Sony Style has the answer. You can trade in your old laptop or desktop using their online calculator to get credit towards any new purchase at Sony Style.
The trade and save format is proving very successful at Sony and fits in perfectly with their environmental program.
Sony are keen to voice their environmental credentials…
Sony does not want anything to go to waste which could potentially harm the environment if improperly disposed. At the same time, Sony wants to make recycling beneficial and convenient for you. That’s why we offer the Sony Notebook Trade-in Program. We’ll not only dispose of your notebook in an environmentally safe manner, we’ll also give you credit towards a new VAIO PC.
So we took them at their word. I have an old Pentium 3 Dell Laptop so was keen to learn how much trade-in value they’d give me for the laptop they were going to responsibly dispose of for me.
Strangely I got this response:
We are sorry but your notebook is ineligible for trade-in
But I thought that…
Sony does not want anything to go to waste which could potentially harm the environment” and that you “not only dispose of (my) notebook in an environmentally safe manner, (you’ll) also give (me) credit towards a new VAIO PC.
Oh well. I suppose my old laptop is just too old to be recycled.
But hang on, I’ve also got this mint condition used once IBM Core 2 Duo with 2 GHz, 200 Gig Hard Drive, Blue tooth, DVD +-
Ah… Sony’s Value Calculator is much more interested in disposing of this terrible piece of unwanted e-waste. In fact, they’ll even give me a whopping $413 trade-in credit for it!!
That’s amazing! Because according to eBay, I should be getting $1650 for it used! Thank you Sony - We’re really happy you’re heart is in the right place when it comes to the environment.
I wonder if some of the laptops on eBay are actually from Sony Style? What a business! 400% mark up for what they buy them for from Joe public. They only make 15% mark up on new stuff. They should go into the trade-in business. Oh yes - they have.
Of course, Sony’s trade and save venture will soon be having a little unwanted competition in the form of trade 2 save, where people will be able to trade-in their used laptops and other consumer electronics for decent prices. They’ll be able to buy and sell in the same online store or trade for an upgrade. Trade 2 save will only buy, sell or trade used or pre-owned products in graded conditions, including computer hardware, consumer electronics, cell phones, gaming and movies. Because trading pre-owned consumer electronics and their consumables is a sure fire way of tackling e-waste.
I find it amazing that a company like Sony can so proudly brag about their trade in / re-cycling program on the one hand, and yet refuse to take anything in that they can’t sell on eBay for 4 times the price!
