World must ramp up e-waste recycling to avoid "chaos"
The world must make a concerted effort to mine electronic waste, not the Earth, says a new study.
The supply of elements used in the creation of consumer gadgets and business tech are running low and continuing to mine the Earth for them is unsustainable, say new findings from The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).
In addition to a lack of natural supplies, global conflicts like the war in Ukraine also affect supply chains, with higher prices passed on to the consumer.
A surge in demand last year, coupled with volatile markets, cause the price of lithium - an essential component in batteries - to rise to nearly five times its starting level between 2021 and 2022.
Discarded tech represents an almost-untapped source of elements like lithium, indium and nickel that are used to create essential technical components.
It is estimated that last year alone, the world threw away more than 57 million tonnes of electronics - and that amount is growing by about 2 million tonnes each year.
Less than 20% of that total is collected for recycling, which is currently a difficult and hazardous process. RSC president Professor Tom Welton called for governments and private businesses to do more to address this challenge.
"Not only do we need governments to overhaul recycling infrastructure and tech businesses to invest in more sustainable manufacturing practices, we need greater public and private investment in research to enable chemical scientists like those at N2S to progress methods of separating critical raw materials from electronic waste for recycling purposes."
According to RSC research of 10,000 people from 10 countries around the world, more than half (57%) of people believe manufacturers should be responsible for the recycling and sustainability of consumer technology.
Nearly two-thirds (62%) of people are worried about the depletion of natural resources caused by manufacturing electronic devices, and about the same (60%) say they would be willing to switch to a rival of their preferred tech brand (i.e. trading Apple for Samsung) if they knew the product they were buying was produced sustainably.
However, despite the appetite for recycling, more than half of people responding to the survey either didn't know what to do with their old tech, or didn't think local processes could handle e-waste.
"Manufacturers and retailers need to take more responsibility," Elisabeth Ratcliffe of the RSC said on Radio 4. "Like 'take-back' schemes, meaning people can return their electronics to a retailer and be assured they will be recycled securely.
"All this volatility in supply chains really just reinforces the fact that we need a circular economy for these materials. At the moment, we're just mining them out of the ground constantly."
The RSC's Precious Elements campaign, launched in 2019 and recently updated with new data, aims to push everyone to be more conscious about how they use and reuse technology.
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