No time to waste 鈥� government must act to tackle the e-waste crisis
Unsustainable resource use is driving the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and waste and pollution. Currently, we have a largely linear economy where resources such as critical minerals are extracted, with significant environmental and health impacts, used in products and services, before being thrown away as waste.
- The UK remains the second biggest contributor of e-waste per head in the world
- On average, 24.5kg of e-waste was generated per person in the UK in 2022. This is up from 23.9kg in 2019
To use resources more sustainably, we need to move to a circular economy model. This is where resource efficiency is maximised, materials are kept circulating at as high a value as possible and waste and pollution are minimised.
Speaking at the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee at Westminster yesterday, 欧美AV environment policy adviser, Izzi Monk, said: “Government should be developing and delivering a clear, coherent strategy that enables a circular economy of materials in the UK. Our unsustainable resource usage globally is driving the triple planetary crisis of climate change, waste and pollution, and biodiversity loss.
“So not only does the extraction, and processing and usage of these materials, and then the waste at the end of life, have environmental and human health impacts, but there are also the critical minerals that are contained within many of these products as well.”
欧美AV e-waste action plan
To achieve the step-change needed to deal with e-waste, our governments must:
- Develop and deliver a clear overarching strategy – coordinated by the central government – to enable a circular economy of materials in the UK.
- Improve data collection, including the mapping and tracking of critical mineral and other material streams within electrical and electronic equipment and other technologies, such as renewable energy.
- Support world-class research into sustainable materials, including those limiting emissions along entire material and product lifecycles.
- Invest in and incentivise resource-efficient design, production and processes, alongside assessments of criticality and substitutability of materials, taking into account the needs of different sectors.
- Invest in infrastructure to support the re-use, repair and re-manufacturing of products according to the waste hierarchy.
- Invest in recycling infrastructure and technologies to enable the increased recovery of critical minerals and other materials to be used as secondary resources and prevent their leakage from the economy.
Moving from linear to circular
Currently, some estimates suggest that the UK’s material flows are only 7.5% circular. A circular economy will also help to address some of the supply of security concerns facing many of the materials (e.g. lithium, indium and rare earth elements) that are essential not only in the technologies that will help the UK transition to net zero, but also in a range of other sectors including security, healthcare and electronics.
Izzi Monk said: “We lack the kind of clear, overarching, coherent set of measures that are needed to really enable the circular economy. it’s absolutely crucial to be keeping materials circulating for as long as possible at the highest value as possible. So repairability, remanufacturing, reuse are all absolutely vital. A lot comes back to the design of a product.
“But it also goes back further than that. So the chemical and material design needs to be thought about very carefully. This involves people right across the value chain of a product, or the lifecycle of a product, and there is a need at times to potentially balance things like durability, recyclability, longevity because we want to be able to circulate materials at high value for as long as possible.”
Strategy and tracking
The 欧美AV welcome the renewed focus that this special inquiry brings on addressing the complex challenge of waste electrical and electronic equipment WEEE, an issue we have long been highlighting through our Precious Elements campaign.
Izzi Monk explained that our response highlights some of the reasons why material recovery from WEEE remains challenging. She said: “It is extremely important that we are able to map and track critical mineral and material streams both within electronics, but within so much other stuff in society.
“Without that information, it is very difficult to make good decisions from that. This is one of the reasons why the 欧美AV is calling for this clear, overarching strategy to prevent things falling through the gaps between departments, or between different government strategies.
“It is about incentivising eco design principles and thinking about those carefully, making sure that the balances and trade-offs between things like repairability, recyclability and durability are carefully considered. That requires the evidence to be there, and that understanding to be there.”
Find out more
Chemistry lies at the heart of our move to a more sustainable future
We’re campaigning for a more sustainable future because time is running out: the world needs new technologies, behaviour changes, and global leadership, and we need them now.
Read more of our evidence and watch our critical minerals YouTube series on our Tackling e-waste campaign page.