UK NEEDS TO JOIN £63BN GOLDRUSH TO RECYCLE E-WASTE: INSIDER PANEL
19 Oct 2020
Britain is missing out on a £63bn opportunity to reuse and recycle the growing mountains of electronic waste because of old business models and by shipping discarded devices overseas, according to panellists on an Insider forum.
Insider’s Tackling Electronic Waste forum has said there an imperative to tackle the 50 million plus tonnes of e-waste being generated annually because many of the minerals within it - rare earths and precious metals – will start running out within a decade.
THE PROBLEM
More than 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are created each year, estimated to rise to 75 million by the middle of the decade, according to the panel, held in part to mark International E-Waste Day.
It is potentially a "bigger monster" than plastic waste because of its propensity to pollute, but also a bigger opportunity not least of the rare earths and metals in discarded electronic equipment - almost a tenth of the world’s gold is contained in e-waste.
However instead of being treated as a resource by British business vast amounts of e-waste is being shipped overseas to the third world. Many of these rare metals and earths would start running out in as little as ten years.
"E-waste is something we need not just to reduce but to use as a resource," said Sebastien Farnaud, professor in enterprise and innovation, healthcare and technologies at Coventry University.
"Currently the way we treat it is detrimental to the environment, detrimental to health - but it could be worth a fortune: e-waste already contains seven per cent of the world’s gold, for example, and other scarce resources than could run out. It is important to make sure these metals stay with us in the UK rather than being loaded onto containers and sent to who knows where."
RECYCLING
"It is by hitting on that bottom line, the profit, that we can influence many companies to take this seriously: there are serious shortages looming with metals such as silver, zinc, indium, gold, tantalum, and we need to preserve them," said Mattie Yeta, head of sustainability, IT Defra.
"But there are opportunities: the value of e-waste produced annually is about £62.5bn - more than the GDP of most countries. One we produce and design electronic products with longer lifecycles and reparability in mind."
"There is a tendency to sweep the issue of e-waste under the carpet and export the problem to places like China, where they do have the ability and technologies to extract metals, because it is cheaper," added Andy Gomarsall, director of N2S, which specialises in managing lifecycles of IT equipment.
"However we don’t keep enough evidence of how it is treated there and many of the techniques used to extract metals are based around either heat or acid, both of which can be very harmful to the environment."
"We will soon be running out of many of the metals we use in electronic devices, as soon as ten years", said Ellen Wilson, sustainability and smart cities lead at Microsoft UK.
"So that means there is an economic necessity to look at the lifecycle of product, including most of the carbon released while making them."
There is already a great deal of legislation in the UK, going back to at least 2003, promoting the better disposal, reduction and reuse of electronic devices.
One of the most promising ways of getting materials from e-waste was being pioneered by Coventry University and N2S: bioleaching - a technique borrowed from the mining industry - which uses bacteria to extract metals by oxidising them. Bioleaching avoided some of the environmental problems and toxicity associated with acids or burning waste.
REPAIRABILITY
However recycling e-waste was only part of the solution and opportunity: just as important is promoting the repair and reuse of electronic devices, reducing consumption and extending product lifecycles.
Farnaud believed that there had to be a radical cultural change among consumers away from "wanting a shiny new phone ever year the disposing of it" which could only be achieved with incentives.
However the culture change on recycling and reparability also had to take place among manufacturers and sellers. Gomarsall noted that large parts of the electronics industry, notably resellers "who sell the technology, who are very well remunerated, frankly don’t care about the end of life of a product, with no thought or repair or recycle".
The problem was compounded by a generation of business leaders who had never studied, or even heard of, ideas like circular economy: there needed to be an education programme aimed at management if corporate culture was to change.
Pressure to change had to come from consumers demanding provable outcomes on what happened to their old devices. This was a mistake because a clear recycling policy and use of sustainable materials would "send sales through the roof".
Julia Denham, said that, bar a few exceptions such as Dutch manufacturer Fairphone which designs reparability into its products, the mobile phone industry was built around "having a nice shiny, beautifully designed model” every 18 months, which both consumed scarce materials and added to the e-waste tonnage.
"We have a fundamental question to ask," she added. "Do we tinker around the edges with reparability or do we look to change whole social and business models where, instead of demanding a new phone, consumers demand that their existing models be repaired and upgraded.
"And how can businesses continue to make money under that model? But for those that do there is a real first mover advantage in their market to be had."
Denham showed how even a large communications and IT company like BT could change it business model to embrace the circular economy. It was now refurbishing and reusing about a third of its set-top boxes and routers – which did not carry the same social cache as mobile phones - and planned to increase that figure.
It was also looking at how to recycle the masses of old BT copper cable in the ground, and “amazing materials” from old telephone exchanges, both being made redundant by fibre optics.
It was a similar story at Microsoft. Wilson explained how the tech giant - one of the world’s biggest consumers of servers - had moved quickly to specifically redesigning them so they could be returned and repaired by customers, and their lifespans extended from the current four to five years, and achieving a 90 per cent reuse rate of parts.
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