About electronics and people
Considering that there will be 62 million tons of e-waste in 2022 (1), of which less than 25% will be properly collected and recycled, e-waste will become the fastest growing waste stream in the world, 5 times faster than our recycling efforts!
They are difficult and expensive to recycle, even with all the high-quality metals they contain such as copper, aluminum or gold, or rarer and often toxic metals such as cadmium and mercury. In the electronics industry, rare metals from recycling constitute less than 1% of resources… clearly demonstrating the difficulty of recovering them.
What does 62 million tons look like? Up to 1.5 million semi-trailers with a carrying capacity of 44 tons each; enough to travel around more than half the Earth at the equator in bumper trucks (16.5 meters x 1.5 million = 24,700 km – Circumference of the Earth at the equator: 40,000 km).
62,000,000,000 kg divided by 8 billion inhabitants is about 8 kg per inhabitant per year, distributed very unevenly; for example 21 kg/inhabitant. in France and almost 10 times less in India (2). In any case, this is a lot.
The problem is that the life cycle of electronic devices is quite short, in most cases less than 5 years, and they are difficult to repair. In any case, what’s the point of repairing a device that uses more electricity than its replacement, whose performance is lower, and whose repair cost approaches the cost of replacement?
In short, we will continue to produce them in large quantities because the next electronic wonders will include artificial intelligence chips, more efficient memory and other features that will make previous devices unusable even if they remain fully functional, such as the fax machine, iPod or telephone answering machine.
How are things going in our schools?
Measure weight using electronic devices at my school
Below you will find a general list of the most common electronic devices and their approximate weight. We weighed several pieces.
We assumed that a high school consisted of 1,000 students, 200 staff, 40 classrooms, 25 students per class, and 8 sets of laptops shared between grade levels, a basic instructional production studio, a library, and a Wi-Fi network. throughout the establishment. Robots, external drives and other special products should be added to “other devices”.
The weight of the devices is approximate; new ones are usually a little lighter.
We have not included cables and connectors because they tend to last longer.
The total is a little more than 5 tons, or one ton per year, 5 kg of electronic equipment per person. If we estimate a generous life expectancy at an average of 5 years, we get 1 kg per year per student, slightly less if we add staff. When extrapolated to the scale of a university of, say, 20,000 students, the numbers become significant and require action.
After doing the same exercise for my family, I ended up with an astonishing 75kg of electronic equipment per person, including several discarded devices still in the house; more than my body weight! Still assuming a slightly longer lifespan of 6 years, with less intensive use than in school, we still end up with 12.5 kg per year per person. The average for my fellow citizens of 21 kg is still a long way off, but if you add the electronics used at work, in stores, hospitals, transport and all the places where we are provided with services, then we need to get closer.
I invite you to do math for your school and for your home. Even the approximate final figure is still dizzying.
We welcome every innovation, investment or development in the semiconductor and electronics industry, but all this activity and production is starting to take a toll.
Weight of electronics in a school with 1000 students and 200 staff in kg.
What are we doing ?
Now we are collectively solving the problem in the same way as with plastic: not all of the electronic waste sent for recycling is recycled, even when we would like it to be. The rest is buried, burned, and exported to other countries (about 10% is exported, or 5.1 million tons in 2019, 2/3 illegally or uncontrolled (3)).
The idea of mass repair of electronic devices is unlikely as long as innovations continue to follow each other at the current pace. Their recovery is more possible with significant incentives and technological developments. For batteries alone, separating dozens of component types into hundreds of battery types is both a technological and logistical challenge. Now imagine operating on objects as complex and dense as cell phones, or objects as tiny as Bluetooth headphones.
Bruntland Green School, Lead Certified School, Zero Emission School, or whatever title it has earned, is, like the others, stuck with the problem of electronic product consumption. We can certainly raise students’ awareness, but we cannot disconnect them from technological progress or exclude them from social activities by refusing to buy them. Buying less, sharing more, longer, improving it as much as possible are possible paths for schools, waiting for manufacturers to develop products that are easier to refurbish and until current laws force them to do so.
Meanwhile, doing the electronics weight measurement exercise with your students is worth a lot of performances.
Illustration: artstudio_pro – DepositPhotos
Recommendations
(1) Global e-waste monitoring 2024
E-waste is growing five times faster than documented e-waste recycling: UN
https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/
(2) Weight of our e-waste in 2019 – Statista
https://fr.statista.com/infographie/20134/dechets-electroniques-kilo-kg-par-habitant/
(3) Global transboundary e-waste flows
https://ewastemonitor.info/global-transboundary-e-waste-flows/
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