January 20, 2024: E-waste
Good afternoon. Today we will take an overview of electronic waste (e-waste). E-waste is what your electronics and appliances become after they reach the end of their useful lives. E-waste gets attention because of the value of materials that might be recovered from it—reducing the need for virgin mining—and also for the health and environmental damage that results from landfilling or improper recycling.
The Problem
When looking at environmental issues, I like to start with a rough estimate of the magnitude of the problem. If we take climate change, the quintessential environmental issue, mainstream estimates of the social cost of carbon range from about $50-100 per ton, and world emissions are around 40 billion tons per year, so we get a cost of around $2-4 trillion per year. How does e-waste compare to that?
The UN Environment Programme estimates that the market value of minerals in e-waste is $62.5 billion per year. About 17% of that is recycled, so, if the unrecycled portion of e-waste has the same composition as the full waste stream, that leaves about $50 billion on the table per year. Here a study of printed circuit boards finds that these objects contain copper, tin, nickel, silver, gold, and palladium at concentrations significantly higher than would be found in ores. The aforementioned article is from a recycling vendor and goes into much technical detail of how metals recovery from e-waste occurs. There are additional social/external costs from mining that I have not been able to estimate. Note that the market value of metals is not an external cost, as potential value is collected by recyclers.
Unfortunately, e-waste contains some less desired materials, including mercury, lead, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These materials cause substantial health damage when e-waste is recycled informally. But precision on the magnitude of this damage is impossible. The aforementioned report, citing several studies, estimates 12.5-56 million people employed in the informal waste sector. Not all of this deals with e-waste specifically, and these figures are highly uncertain (there is more than a factor of 4 in the range, after all) and based on old data. The report says that informal e-waste recycling and improper dumping “affects the health of millions of children”, but I have no idea what “affects” means. This meta-review goes into great detail about the health impacts. Because of the presence of toxic heavy metals, e-waste landfilling also inflicts damage to air quality, water quality, and soil health, as outlined here.
An estimate for the social cost of e-waste recycling in Southern China is $423/tonne. If we multiply this figure by the ~44 million tons of e-waste that is not recycled every year, we get a total cost of around $19 billion. Obviously this is only one estimate for one particular geography, but it should at least give us a sense of the order of magnitude of the problem.
There is an estimate of around $700 billion spent in 2023 worldwide on devices (PCs, tablets, mobile phones, and printers). Incidentally, that is up from $676 billion in 2012, not the major growth that one might expect. These figures comprise a subset of all material that will become e-waste.
To recap, our crude estimates are as follows. In annual amounts worldwide,
>$700B in spending on electronics.
$62.5B in precious metal content, including $51B in unrecovered minerals (the amount could be less because informally recycled e-waste doesn’t count, and the composition of the unrecycled portion might not match the composition of the full waste stream).
$19B in health and environmental damage from landfilled or improperly recycled e-waste.
Unknown social costs from the mining of minerals needed for electronics.
Two observations come from this. First, we have a total impact that is around 2-4% of that of climate change. Thus e-waste is not a trivial issue, but a couple of orders of magnitude less significant than climate change. Second, we see that spending exceeds social costs by a factor of probably more than 10, which means that any set of taxes or regulations that rationally deals with social cost should not substantially alter the worldwide electronics market.
Many sources that I look at describe e-waste as a “rapidly growing problem”, but that should also be put into perspective, as with the statistic cited above on total spending. This paper cites a 2004 study that e-waste constitutes 2-5% of the U.S. waste stream. If we take some recent statistics (I think these are whatever the most recently estimated values are) and divide worldwide e-waste by total world municipal solid waste, we get a figure of around 3%. I know this is comparing U.S. to world figures, so it might not be the most apt, but it still doesn’t look to me that e-waste volumes are growing any faster than waste in general. For this reason, I take with a grain of salt reports that machine learning model training will substantially increase e-waste volumes in the future.
All right, now that we have made an attempt to understand the scope of the issue, what do we do about it?
Solutions
First, there is the issue of waste exportation. The Basel Convention, which went into effect in 1992, is the main international agreement that governs transnational trade of hazardous waste. In 2022, the convention’s COP-15 added restrictions on e-waste, to take effect on January 1, 2025. Under the new rules, it will not be allowed to transfer e-waste from one country to another with lower GDP per capita without prior informed consent. The United States is the only large country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, though the U.S. did sign it in 1990. Yang and Fulton argue that the U.S. should ratify the agreement.
Unfortunately, many people in low-income countries are pushed into hazardous and unpleasant informal recycling jobs, as well as subsistence agriculture and artisanal mining, for a lack of better opportunities. Banning e-waste exports will not solve this problem.
In the European Union, e-waste is governed by the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive, which sets standards for collection of e-waste and on exportation, among other things. Here’s the consolidated version if you care to read it (this might be a good time to disclose that, just because I link something, doesn’t mean that I’ve read more than a few paragraphs). Although Switzerland is not a member of the EU, they have implemented the WEEE Directive and achieved the world’s highest e-waste recycling rate of 59%. Recall that this compares to a worldwide recycling rate of 17%.
Whatever the socially optimal rate of e-waste recycling is, it’s not 100%. As recycling rates increase, we expect the marginal cost of collection and recycling to go up and the marginal benefit to go down. At some point, it must be that the costs outweigh the benefits of further recycling, even if it is theoretically possible. I don’t have a good sense of what this practical limit might be.
According to an estimate in this paper, the cost of recycling is $450-1000 per tonne of material and the cost of landfilling is $150-250/tonne, so we have additional cost of recycling anywhere from $200-850/tonne. And according to these stats, the value of minerals contained in e-waste is $1250/tonne. Whatever the optimum rate of recycling is, these figures make me think that there is substantial room to increase it.
The most obvious question is, if the case for expanding recycling is so good, what prevents the private sector from stepping in and doing so? Collection might be an issue. A large cell phone might weigh 200 grams. The net profit from recycling should be, on average, $925/tonne based on the above figures. And so a recycler should pay 18.5¢ for a large cell phone. A laptop typically weighs 1.8-2.7 kilograms, and so the recycler should pay $1.66-2.50 for the laptop. These seem like trivial monetary amounts for most people, and this makes me wonder if the logistics of collection are a major cost that substantially alters the apparent profitability of e-waste recycling.
Most municipalities treat waste collection as a public good, and waste collection is either directly operated by the city/county, or it is operated indirectly through franchising, and this is the main argument for public involvement in carrying out collection, or at least funding it. For example, there was a U.S. Department of Energy loan for an EV battery recovery facility last year. This approach can invite inefficiency, though, as government recycling programs are not subject to the same market discipline that a private company is subject to, and policies can be driven more by politics than sound economics. Since e-waste recycling recovers metals that are considered critical minerals, there is a national security argument as well.
Another approach is extended producer responsibility (EPR), which assesses the ultimate cost for recycling or disposal to the vendor of a product. Nuclear power plants are familiar with this concept, as they were once assessed a fee of 0.1¢/kWh for the development of a waste repository at Yucca Mountain that never happened. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a database of state EPR policies, which assess a fee on vendors of certain products, such as computer, televisions, DVD players, etc., to pay for a recycling system for them. Which products are covered varies by state. These mandates are sometimes accompanied by bans on landfilling and incineration for certain products. There does not exist a national EPR, and some authors argue that a national EPR would be more efficient than a state-by-state system.
Finally, there are several approaches to designing electronics to facilitate recycling. These include using fewer hazardous substances such as lead and to use materials that lend themselves to recycling methods such as eddy-current technology (a magnetic field that separates metals with different magnetic responses) and optical sorting.
I hope that this has been a useful introduction to e-waste and approaches to recycling. As always, I welcome feedback, particularly if anyone can help fill the gaps in the statistics presented above.
Quick Hits
In a recent post on agricultural R&D, I neglected another recent study that shows substantial benefits for agricultural R&D in the United States. Aside from the financial benefits to farmers, there would be greenhouse gas reduction benefits.
Matt Wald has written a fairly extensive and technical overview of the state of advanced nuclear reactors. There is much more going on these days than NuScale. A free registration is required to access this article.
Here is Brian Potter of Construction Physics again with an analysis of the decline of the machine tool industry in the United States. Machine tools are one of the fundamental industries for an industrial economy, but the American industry has become inefficient and uninnovative and lost ground to industries in Japan, Germany, Italy, and China.
Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina, gave a speech at Davos this week that outlines a libertarian approach to governance. I don’t feel a need to dissect every point he made in detail, but one thing that strikes me is how ideological the speech was. It feels more like something I would expect to hear from a blog such as this one rather than from a high-ranking elected official. I am looking forward to seeing the results of Milei’s administration and how well he can put libertarian principles into practice in Argentina. The introduction begins at 04:20 and Milei’s speech begins at 06:02 and lasts for just under 23 minutes.
One of the claims from the anti-vaccine movement is that COVID vaccines cause blood clots and cause people to die, especially from strokes and heart attacks. On Twitter, Tyler Black examines Canadian mortality data and finds evidence for this claim to be lacking.