Almost all of the work the consumer-electronics industry puts into products covers the design, manufacturing and use phases. The end of life of electronics is the preserve of the waste-industry publications, policy wonks, freegans and hackers.
Recyclers are constantly playing catch-up to an ever-faster cycle of new products, new materials and new technologies - having to invent new techniques and business models for processing dead devices. And they are in danger of losing that race: the United Nations predicted that electronic waste would reach 45 million tonnes in 2017.
This estimate is an amount we can barely comprehend - it's nearly 1,000 Titanics' worth of discarded electronics, much of it extremely toxic if its disposal and recycling is mishandled.
Europe, alongside Korea and Japan, is a leader in the collection of electronic waste, with a system based on "extended producer responsibility" - putting the burden on producers to ensure electronic waste doesn't damage the environment. But the bar is low. In the EU, a third of e-waste still ends up in landfill. In the UK, a 2016 survey found that 24 per cent of discarded gadgets are dumped indiscriminately with other household garbage.
The EU has set ambitious targets for member states' collection rates, reaching 65 per cent by 2019. But the UK is unlikely to be part of that programme, however, because of Brexit.
The easiest way for many people to recycle is take electronics back to bricks-and-mortar retailers, a service offered in many major markets. However, almost all recent growth in consumer-electronic retail has been online - and giants such as Amazon US are only just starting to use their massive logistics networks in reverse, for trading in functioning gadgets (a little-known service) and recycling (currently only Amazon-branded devices). Amazon UK has not even started, despite research showing UK consumers have an appetite for take-back services like this.
What's more, as we face an increased volume of products on the market, the nature of what we buy - and what we throw away - is changing too. Electronics are coming in smaller sizes and use lower-value materials. This is attractive to the consumer but their complexity means that extracting value from these devices when dead requires more work. And many of the products we buy today are almost designed to be difficult to recycle (LCD televisions being a key example) with glued-in batteries and fiddly circuit boards that require significant human intervention.
In 2018 we will see recyclers - as well as those who want to repair things - increasingly demanding products that are easy to disassemble, and easy access to disassembly instructions from producers of electronics. And citizens will discover that somebody has to pay for loss-making waste - either subsidising its processing (at the point of purchase or through other mechanisms) or through providing investment and loans to make recycling economically viable.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
