The war against waste rages on. Be it food, clothing, electronics, paper, plastic – you name it, we waste it.

More than two billion metric tons of human-generated waste gets thrown away every year, cluttering the global environment and polluting ecosystems around the world. Worse, we’re on track to throw away even more: around 3.78 billion metric tons of the stuff by 2050.

For that reason – and despite it – folks around the world are marking this month and this week as Circular Economy Month and Waste Reduction Week. It’s been more than 20 years since the first Waste Reduction Week initiative, with aims of increasing awareness and education about the tissue, while tackling it head on with various reduce, reuse and recycle efforts.

Here at WhatsYourTech.ca, we’ve reported on the issue of waste – and some creative Canadian efforts to address the topic using technology – for nearly as long. Over the years, we’ve looked at food, clothing, plastics, and other products from a reuse and recycle perspective.

And course, we’ve written about technology. All those consumer gadgets, digital devices, smart products and more. Business tools from printers to POS terminals to entire server farms. We’ve written about many people and companies whose goal is to keep what we buy out of the garbage, to recycle it, reuse it, repair it or perhaps reconsider buying it in the first place.

But the battle’s being lost.

Waste – and in particular e-waste – continues to grow at an alarming pace. While there are global efforts to collect more electronic waste and manage it responsibly, the results are less than satisfying or effective.

Of that giant human-generated waste total, it estimated that 62 million tonnes of it were e-waste.  Only 22.3 per cent of that was documented as properly collected and recycled. According to The Global E-waste Monitor 2024, Canada generated an estimated 770 million kilograms of electronic waste in 2022 (the U.S., nearly times as much).

Of course, some of the most common items in the global e-waste stream are consumer devices like computers, laptops, mobile phones, wearables and more. There are the larger household items like TVs, refrigerators and other appliances. But also corporate and industrial electronics, medical equipment, enterprise-grade information technology, even solar panels and wind turbines.

(According to a 2021 report out of the University of Ottawa, decommissioned solar panels and wind turbine blades are ending up in landfills because of rapid change in the sector. By 2050, it’s been predicted that Canada could have to deal with 470,000 tonnes of solar panels and 4.5 million tonnes of wind turbine waste.)

Another new contributor to e-waste generation is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence.

AI can quickly make much of our current computing resources and information technology outdated; it also uses a lot more than hardware to work its magic. Rapidly changing infrastructure requirements – all those cables, monitors and mainframes – in the cloud is another source of e-waste.

And because we want and have come to expect constant innovation in the consumer electronics and IT sector, our e-stuff faces continued obsolescence and constant upgrading, shorter lifecycles, more disposal and increased discarding.

According to the fourth Global E-waste Monitor, there are 2.6 million more tonnes of e-waste every year. As such, we’re going to face 82 million tonnes of it by 2030, an increase of a one third over two years ago.

Of course, one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. All this e-waste has created a huge market opportunity.

The e-waste management market is said to be worth about $167 billion today; by 2034, it’s projected to pass $70 billion.

The e-waste management market targets various industries by promoting environmental sustainability, resource efficiency, and overall profitability. There’s a lot of recycling technologies and processes at play, and a desire for improved recovery of valuable minerals and materials from e-waste. Even though it’s common in some regions for us to generate some 18 kg of e-waste per capita, enhanced collecting and recycling efforts can reduce that to 7.5 kg per capita.

Certainly, recycling makes a lot of sense when trying to reduce e-waste, but so too reuse, refurbish, repair, remarket or replace at a modular or component level (not the entire device).

So, Circular Economy Month encourages the reuse of products and the reduction of waste, and aligned with Waste Reduction Week, its agenda and activities are dedicated to educating us on how to minimize waste in all areas of life.

Held this year from October 21 to 26 (dates may vary by region), Waste Reduction Week opens with Repair Monday, and various events where gadgets can be tweaked and fixed and repaired to be almost as good as new.

Just one example is the ecoCaledon (Ontario) Repair Café, where local residents learned from volunteer repair people just how easy it is to fix rather than replace broken items as part of overall efforts to reduce waste and embrace sustainability.

Then, there’s E-waste Wednesday, during which consumers are encouraged to repair or replace devices (or get manufacturers to take them back for remanufacturing and remarketing), and businesses are shown how reverse logistics measures can improve the collection of devices back for similar refurbishing.

On Food Waste Friday, we’ll be encouraged to make a pledge and commit to making choices that will keep our food from becoming waste.

Other events during Waste Reduction Week will focus on clothing and textiles, and on plastics, while also encouraging the swapping and sharing of things we all need, but often throw away.

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AMONG THE MANY WHATSYOURTECH STORIES ABOUT E-WASTE AND RELATED TOPICS:

How to Recycle Your Old Electronics

E-waste is Still a Big and Growing Problem, Despite Recycling Efforts Large and Small

Global Health Hazard: A Pandemic of Harmful E-waste and Recycling Activities

Canadian Businesses Must Rethink Device Replacement Strategies

Pre-owned Products an Attractive Option for Tech Consumers and Manufacturers

Buying Refurbished Tech: Is It Worth It?

 

Canadian Tech Start-up Reduces Fraudulent Returns, Online Refunds, Landfill Waste

Canadian Company Works to Stop the Food Waste that Costs Us Billions

Fighting Against Food Waste, One Recipe at a Time

Cleantech Startup Says the Last Straw is Our Plastic Waste

Canadian Company Energized by Li-Ion Battery Recycling for Good Reasons

HP seeks to turn more e-waste into new products  

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