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The escalating problem of electronic waste — and how to deal with it

The escalating problem of electronic waste — and how to deal with it
Consumer market. (Image: Zion Market Research)
Don Pinnock
By Don Pinnock
17 Jul 2024
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Where do your old smartphones, laptops, washing machines, digital cameras, refrigerators and external hard drives go when they give up the ghost? We should recycle, but mostly we don’t.

Your smartphone died so you had to buy another one. The dead one will languish in a drawer for a while but inevitably you’ll bin it. At which point you will feed a global statistic. It will become part of about 70 million tonnes of global e-waste that would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks which, bumper-to-bumper, could encircle the equator – and poison the planet.

We’re the world’s first electronic civilisation, born of the discovery of electricity. Now the stuff it powers is so ubiquitous that it’s unthinkable to live without the electronic gadgets we’ve come to depend on. In a society driven by innovation, modernisation and urbanisation, they’ve become indispensable.

This addiction makes huge profits for the corporations that manufacture it. The products are household names like Apple, Canon, Sony, Dell, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Hitachi, Siemens and Bosch.

But here’s the problem: the stuff doesn’t last. Even when it does, we dump it and upgrade. The world’s generation of electronic waste is rising five times faster than e-waste recycling. Worldwide, the annual generation of e-waste is growing by 2.6 million tonnes annually, on track to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030.

electronic waste Disassembling e-waste. (Photo: Jonathan de Vries)


Hazardous waste


It’s a massive global problem we have to fix. E-waste contains both valuable and potentially hazardous materials. 

Electronic goods contain dangerous substances which may be small in each item but mount up when they become part of a landfill mountain. There it can leach into the underground water table or rise as dust if crushed. Properly processed, however, e-waste is valuable.

In this respect, how are we doing in South Africa? I asked veteran e-waste campaigner Jonathan de Vries, who started a waste company in 2004 called African Sky with — can you believe it? — musician Johnny Clegg (hence the name). These days he’s CEO of the R2E2 producer responsibility organisation.

“I called e-waste collection above-ground mining,” he says. “E-waste had a lot of precious metal content back then: gold, copper, some platinum, silver. But producers became more and more efficient at using less and less precious minerals. It’s tougher now.”

What concerns him is where it ends up. In 2004, he engaged with the Department of Environmental Affairs about creating a legislative environment to take responsibility for e-waste. It was frustrating. Solutions were talked about rather than implemented and some producers were happy about governmental dysfunction because they didn’t have to take responsibility. 

However, some important legislative development had begun, and when Barbara Creecy became minister she was able to insert producer responsibility into the Environmental Management Waste Act of 2021. It forced the producers and importers of new electronics to take responsibility for the products’ end of life. They had to pay a levy based on their products’ volumes in the market.

“It created producer responsibility organisations (PROs), but a single sentence undid it by saying it would be run by producers who would pay into a fund for recycling. And it created extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes which would distribute the funds, leaving actual recyclers out of the game. 

“It was a bold and intelligent move,” says De Vries, “but it had a design flaw. It was like building a beautiful rugby stadium, well-watered and manicured, then finding it was 10m too short so you couldn’t actually play the game.  

“Any producer could decide for themselves how they make the calculation of what they put on the market in any given year. Some, like Bosch and Eurolux, go by the rules, but most don’t.”

(Graphic: Global Report on e-waste)


What is recycling?


This revealed another flaw: a lack of clarity about what constitutes recycling and how payment happens when you do. Recycled or repurposed? How do you trace what’s done and who’s doing it?

To get paid, people have to send in reports about how much has been recycled. Maybe you recycled 30 tonnes, but what’s stopping you from adding a nought to make it 300 if nobody’s checking properly? You could get in 20 Dell laptops, claim for them, then sell them to another recycler who would also claim for them. 

“This is South Africa, people are going to game the system for sure,” says De Vries.

(Graphic: Global Report on e-waste)



(Graphic: Global Report on e-waste)



(Graphic: Global Report on e-waste)



“It created a sort of parasitic bureaucracy that feeds off the recycling ecosystem without adding much value. That’s the danger because the PROs are formed by ‘protrepeneurs’ and it’s possible for them to undertake a large-scale greenwashing exercise. It’s a box-ticking exercise.

“Then there’s the problem of collection. When your washing machine or fridge or cellphone cracks up, who do you call to collect it? We need an easy national collection system. The legislation should have aimed at 30% or even 50% collection rates, but it settled on 17% for 2024. In practice, it’s probably three or four percent. You have a bureaucracy that creates the appearance of working in the sector for recycling, giving the producers the appearance of compliance.”

(Image: Supplied)


Are there solutions?


De Vries thinks there are and they have to do with collecting and tracing e-waste as it moves through the system. He says people aren’t going to hand in their e-waste if it’s difficult and easier to just dump. His idea is to have collection points at shopping malls across the country.

“We did a pilot at the East Rand Mall and it was hugely successful. We collected just over 30 tonnes of household e-waste, working mainly with local schools and the mall. South Africa has more shopping malls per population than anywhere else on the continent. At one time, everybody goes to a mall. 

“Both public and collection operations could use the facility and local recyclers would have focus points. It’s also great for local job creation. That way we can solve an environmental problem and simultaneously create at least 10,000 jobs, not to mention properly integrating hard-working recyclers hiding in plain sight – waste pickers. 

“Based on years of experience we know how many tonnes of e-waste collected a year creates one permanent job. But we have to get PROs to cooperate and right now they don’t.” 

Read more in Daily Maverick: There are good reasons for recycling that old vape or iPhone lying in your drawer

Tracking e-waste through the system used to be complicated, but digitally – and even using AI – it’s now much more possible, says De Vries.

“What you need is a track-and-trace tool to do this and we’ve developed one. You put on a barcode and time stamp when the item is collected for recycling, take a photo with the app on your cellphone which gives its geolocation and time stamp and use the app to follow the item to its final recycling or destruction. 

“That way you verify that what claims to be recycled is really recycled and make payment through PROs precise.”

For these steps to happen, all the PROs need to collaborate and combine their collection spending into a national collection model. It’s possible, says De Vries, but those involved will take some convincing.

The dysfunctional system is working for producers who don’t want to see such sophisticated oversight. And for PROs, money coming in with little oversight is just fine. But De Vries is a campaigner with a long history and he’s not giving up.

(Graphic: Zion Market Research)



“Government officials in the Department of Environment’s waste division are doing their best and support the digital track-and-trace system and national collection models. They’re genuinely well-meaning and decent people. But I think they’re overstretched. 

“They’re unable to make and enforce the quick, bold decisions necessary to make the system deliver on the intended recycling outcomes. That will need to come from director-general and ministerial level.”

Creating jobs


The underlying problem is that e-waste in landfills poses serious health risks to the environment. That should be central to the debate, but isn’t. 

“We need to start with the basic question of how to build the recycling economy to create jobs. That pathway is crystal clear; we know exactly what to do,” says De Vries.

“But in my interactions with the PROs and producers I’m finding environmental considerations don’t even enter into the discussion. It’s like: ‘We’ve ticked the boxes so what’s your problem?’ 

“The original sin for me is in the design of the legislation which required that producers exclusively run the PROs. In that one sentence in the law, the recyclers are excluded from the game. 

“Recyclers, including waste pickers, should be represented on the boards of PROs to shape strategy and projects. Instead, we have these occasional ill-conceived stunts like Makro where you can drop things like nappies for recycling (a brief flash in the pan), where millions of rands are spent on projects which actually damage real recycling efforts. 

“Producers of electronics have never done recycling. That’s not their core competency. Many, though not all, producers are not interested in end-of-life problems their stuff causes. 

The PRO system is up for review in two years and if it’s not delivering outcomes of significance it will probably be collapsed.

“Unless the new minister of environment is bold and brave, we’ll have to work with what we’ve got,” says De Vries. 

Recyclers will be waiting to see if the new environment minister, Dion George, will build on the work done by his predecessor, Creecy. With a few strategic interventions he could go a long way to solving the country’s e-waste problem and create a huge number of jobs at the very base of the job market. 

“If I was the minister, says De Vries, “I’d just change the law.” DM



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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