I went from Yale to Jail! lol

[(David P.)]

Electronic Waste on the Decline, New Study Finds
By Geoffrey Giller, December 1, 2020, Yale University

A new study, led by a researcher at the Yale School of the
Environment’s Center for Industrial Ecology and published
recently in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, has found
that the total mass of electronic waste generated by
Americans has been declining since 2015. In an age when
most of us can’t imagine life without our digital devices,
this surprising finding has ramifications for both how we
think about electronic waste’s future and for the laws and
regulations regarding e-waste recycling, according to the
study’s authors.

The biggest contributor to this decline is the disappearance
of the large, bulky cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs and computer
monitors from American homes, says Callie Babbitt, a professor
at R.I.T.’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability and one of
the study’s authors. Since about 2011, CRT displays have been
on the decline in the waste stream, helping to lead the overall
decline in total e-waste mass.

This decline in bulkier displays means that e-waste regulations
may have to be rethought, says Babbitt. “If you look at the state
laws that exist in many places for e-waste recycling, many of
them set their targets based on product mass,” she says. As the
overall mass of e-waste declines, meeting those targets becomes
more difficult. Moreover, says Babbitt, the main goal of these
regulations had been to keep electronics with high levels of
lead and mercury out of landfills, where they can eventually
leach into the surrounding environment. But these days, a more
pertinent concern is how to recover elements like cobalt (used
in lithium-ion batteries) or indium (found in flat-panel displays).
These elements aren’t as environmentally toxic; rather, they are
relatively scarce in the Earth’s crust, so failing to recapture
them for reuse in new electronics is wasteful. “The e-waste
recycling system is somewhat backwards-looking,” says Babbitt;
it has struggled to keep pace with the changing nature of electronics.

Shahana Althaf, the lead author on the study and a postdoctoral
associate at the Yale Center for Industrial Ecology, notes that
a shift in e-waste recycling to capture more of these critical
elements could also help the United States secure its supply of
the ingredients required for manufacturing electronic devices.
Geopolitical uncertainties can pose threats to what Althaf terms
“mineral security” for the U.S. “People are slowly realizing...
the need to ensure domestic supply,” she says. Rather than mining
the ore from the Earth’s crust, capturing the elements from
electronic waste could instead provide these crucial elements.
In addition to mineral security, this would reduce the environmental
destruction that traditional mining often entails.

The sheer number of electronic devices entering the waste stream
is also leveling off or slightly declining, Babbitt and Althaf say.
This is due to something that Babbitt terms “convergence”: gaming
consoles, for example, can act as DVD players; smartphones are
also cameras and video recorders. In the past, says Babbitt,
people needed separate devices for each of those applications.

To amass the data necessary for their study, the authors used
material flow analysis, a technique for quantifying the resources
going into or out of a system. They focused on twenty categories
of digital devices — including computers, smartphones, digital
cameras, and audio-visual equipment — and disassembled dozens of
products in a lab in order to determine the relative content of
various important elements, in addition to relying on previously
published data.

“This is a very important finding that cuts against the widely
held idea that electronic waste is the ‘fastest growing waste
stream,’ ” says Reid Lifset, the editor-in-chief of the Yale-based
Journal of Industrial Ecology. “It shifts our understanding of the
problem with e-waste,” he says. In the United States, e-waste
recycling is regulated at the state level, and only half the
states have e-waste recycling laws. That leads to a patchwork of
regulations which makes it harder for companies to navigate if they
wanted to make their products easier to recycle, says Babbitt. A
more holistic, federal approach could help increase the overall
capture of rare elements. Ultimately, we should “see waste as a
resource,” says Althaf: an opportunity, rather than a problem.

https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/electronic-waste-on-the-decline-new-study-finds