E-waste, including vapes, chargers becoming a 9-million-tonne problem

Vaping, once a trend, is now passé. At least from an environmental point of view.

E-waste is rapidly becoming a rising environmental concern and an increasingly wasteful economic one. 

In 2019 alone, $9.5 billion in materials – mostly in copper, iron and gold – was lost in landfills from waste that had not been recycled.

This "invisible" waste is mostly composed of disposable electronics such as vapes, toys and cables. Instead of being recycled,  a vast majority is simply dumped and forgotten, denying supply chains of valuable materials, reports The Verge.

A recent analysis by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) stated the number of vapes thrown away annually across the world exceeds 44,000 tonnes. For context, that's the total weight of four Eiffel towers combined. 

But that's just a small slice of the e-Waste pie. 

All together, this "invisible" waste that comes in the form of small electronic items amounts to nine million metric tonnes. 

For those keeping track, that's 900 Eiffel towers worth of material.

Beyond the pure economic loss of so much recyclable material being removed from hungry supply chains, there is also the problem of dangerous metals like lead and mercury leaching out of landfills and contaminating soil and water.

While old appliances and computers have been a problem in landfills for decades, the proliferation of new electronic devices, and their chargers, and cables, has caused this issue to balloon into a global mess.

"Consumers very often don't realise that some items contain electronics, and therefore these items don't end up in the right [place], and this is a loss," Magdalena Charytanowicz, communication manager for the nonprofit Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, said in a press briefing.

The amount of discarded cables in 2022, and the valuable copper in them, could have wrapped around the world 107 times. With the demand for this metal only expected to grow in the coming decade for its use in the renewable energy sector, electric vehicles and more, these discarded cables represent both a terrible waste and a vast untapped resource.

There are efforts to recycle these valuable resources from E-waste, but these only cover a small amount of the global total each year. Europe is a leader in recycling these materials, largely due to laws requiring manufacturers to manage the waste their products generate. 

The Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws and the recycling infrastructure that exists in Europe means that around 55% of the E-waste is recycled there, but with a majority of the world lacking these laws and infrastructure, it's estimated that the global collection rate stands at a mere 17%.