The growing e-waste mountain

It’s easy to think that the photos we take have little impact on the climate. But our online lives are far more destructive to the planet than you might think, says Gerry McGovern

A worker prepares motherboards in Kenya to be shipped to Europe for recycling (EPA-EFE)

Half of the roughly 13 trillion photos taken since 1900 were shot in the past five years. In fact, more photos were taken in 2020 than in the entire 20th century. Digital is the great accelerator. Digital puts everything on speed: extraction, production, consumption, waste generation.

Digital is physical. Data consumes electricity. Data creates CO2. The cloud is on the ground. Digital profits from waste. Electronic waste or e-waste (old phones, computers, screens, etc) is piling up in mountains.

Fifty-million tons of e-waste was dumped in 2020. That figure had more than doubled since 2000 and will more than double again by 2050. Fifty-million tons is the equivalent of dumping 1,000 laptops every second. Less than 20 per cent of e-waste is recycled. Much of the e-waste from the global north is dumped in the global south or in eastern Europe, where it poisons the ground, the earth, the water table. Some of it is burned by children, burning their lungs as they “mine” it for precious metals. Many of these precious metals were originally mined in the very same countries where they are now being dumped as e-waste. The original mining, with low or non-existent environmental standards, also often involved children. And thus the global north can smugly say it is reducing its CO2 footprint by outsourcing it to the global south. Digital is dirty.