2019 set a record for the amount of e-waste ever generated worldwide: 53.6 million metric tons of discarded phones, computers, appliances, and other gadgets. That’s more than the combined weight of all the adults in Europe. It’s also a 21 percent increase since 2014, according to a new international report.
Just 17 percent of that waste was officially recycled, the report finds. The vast majority of it was either sent to a landfill, incinerated, or vanished somewhere into the bureaucratic ether when officials lost track of it. The report was meant to document global progress on getting a handle on e-waste, authors of the paper say. Instead, they found that the world has backtracked.
They anticipate that the problem will only get worse. The amount of e-waste is expected to almost double from 2014 levels by 2030. That’s a danger to people’s health, according to the report, because the trash can poison people handling it and the surrounding environment. Asia, the largest and most populous continent, created the most e-waste in 2019. Europe had the highest rate of e-waste per capita, nearly three times that of Asia. Europe also had the highest rate of collecting and recycling its waste.
Source: The Verge
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