The Invisible Trillion · The Mining and E-Waste Question, Honestly

The E-Waste Story

Now we come to the back end of the supply chain, which is what happens to your phone and your laptop when you’re done with them.

Globally, humans generate about 60 million metric tons of electronic waste per year. This is growing at about 3–4% per year. Only about 20% of it is formally recycled. The rest goes into landfills, gets stockpiled, or — most concerning — ends up in informal processing operations in low-income countries.

The informal processing is the part you should know about. There are specific places — Agbogbloshie in Ghana, Guiyu in China (now largely cleaned up, but for twenty years the worst in the world), parts of India and Pakistan — where large quantities of rich-world e-waste get shipped, sometimes legally and sometimes not, to be disassembled for the metals inside.

“Disassembled” in this context means: people, often young people, often without protective gear, burning plastic off copper wires to recover the copper, soaking circuit boards in acid to extract the gold, smashing CRT monitors to get at the components inside. The air in these places is full of lead, mercury, and cadmium. Groundwater is contaminated. Soil is contaminated. Local cancer rates are elevated. Infant mortality is elevated.

This is happening. It is happening now. It has been happening for thirty years. It is improving in some places — Guiyu has been partially shut down; Ghana’s Agbogbloshie was formally closed in 2021, though some processing has moved to other sites — but the fundamental dynamic remains: rich countries produce e-waste, poor countries process it, and the people doing the processing get sick.

The device in your pocket will eventually become e-waste. What happens to it when you’re done with it depends heavily on where you are and what you do. In the EU and increasingly in some US states, there are laws requiring electronics retailers to take back devices for proper recycling. In most of the world, most devices end up in the regular waste stream, and a significant fraction end up, eventually, in one of these informal processing sites.

The best thing an individual person can do about this is the most boring thing: keep your devices longer, and when you do get rid of them, take them to a certified e-waste recycler (R2 or e-Stewards certified in the US). This actually matters. Not because your individual phone is a big deal, but because the choice of where you send your old phone flows into the broader system in a way that individual choices don’t flow into most environmental problems.

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