We discard huge amounts of electronics every year, creating a toxic wasteland – often in the poorest countries
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| We love our gadgets, but we need to find safe ways of disposing of them. Photograph: Oliver Stratmann/AFP/Getty Images
Record sales of tablets, laptops and smart phones. Ever smaller
computers, and thinner televisions, brighter screens and sharper
cameras. What could possibly be wrong with the worldwide explosion in
sales of electrical and digital equipment seen this Christmas? Consumers
love the sleek designs and the new connectivity they offer, businesses
can't make enough for a vast and hungry global market, and governments
see technological innovation and turnover as the quick way out of
recession. This is a new age of the machine and electronic equipment is
indispensable in home and workplace.
But there is a downside to
the revolution that governments and companies have so far ignored. In
the drive to generate fast turnover and new sales, companies have
deliberately made it impossible to repair their goods and have shortened
the lifespan of equipment.
Hardware is designed not to keep up
with software, a computer's life is now under two years and mobile
phones are upgraded every few months. Many electronic devices now have
parts that cannot be removed or replaced. From being cheaper to buy new
devices than to repair them, it has now reached the point where it is
impossible to repair them at all.
The result is that much
electronic equipment is impossible to recycle. As devices are
miniaturised, they become increasingly complex. A single laptop may
contain hundreds of different substances, dozens of metals, plastics and
components which are expensive to dispose of. As we saw last week from Ghana,
vast quantities of this dangerous "e-waste" is being dumped on
developing countries where it is left to some of the poorest people to
try to extract what they can in dangerous conditions.
The scale of
e-waste growth is shocking and has left governments and authorities
behind. By 2017 it is expected that there will be more than 10 billion
mobile-connected devices alone.
From under 10m tonnes of e-waste
generated in 2000, it has now reached nearly 50m tonnes, with every sign
that this will increase by 33% in the next five years. Britain will
discard over 1.3m tonnes of electronics this year, much of which will be
buried in landfill, incinerated or exported.
The
old corporate model of "take, make and chuck" is not sustainable. Our
obsession with gadgetry and technology is now driving industry to open
new mines around the world, squandering energy, biodiversity and water
at every stage of extraction. Enormous areas of toxic wasteland are
created and left for future generations to deal with.
Designing
goods so they can be easily recycled is now critical. Companies must be
challenged to rethink the way they make and source their materials to
ensure there is no waste from start to finish. Gadgets must be reusable
and repairable, and built-in obsolescence discouraged. Companies, too,
must become responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products,
especially when they become obsolete.
Governments must better
monitor waste shipments from ports. E-waste is easy to conceal, and the
black market is attracting organised crime. Natural resources have long
been used to fuel violent conflict and human rights abuses, but now we
must accept that gadgets can be equally dangerous. The sale of millions
of computers and mobile phones, even the electronic toys that we will
give this Christmas, is being driven by an increasingly flawed business
model which is leading to a depleted and polluted planet.
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