e-waste

The rise of AI, and its energy-hogging ways, has added a new wrinkle to international e-waste day, which is Monday, October 14.

The fast-moving technology is expected to spur a spike in sales of new devices to take advantage of AI — while at the same time AI is automating the recycling process to make it more efficient.

“E-waste is just proliferating in people’s everyday lives. You don’t go a couple hours without touching something that ends up as e-waste,” Gerrine Pan, vice president of partnerships at Ridwell, said in an interview. Ridwell collects and transports to recycling partners hundreds of thousands of pounds of e-waste annually from more than 40 unique categories such as e-waste (cords, chargers, external hard drives, old PCs, iPhones, USB sticks), batteries, plastics, film and holiday lights.

“Fortunately, most of the devices we use are getting lighter, and companies are headed toward packaging that can be handled in single-stream recycling,” she said. “And, most important, batteries are getting better in terms of longer-lasting life.”

And yet, the amount of e-waste globally is expected to grow to 181 billion pounds in 2030 from 137 billion pounds in 2022, according to the latest UN’s General E-Waste Monitor.

What is more, the amount of e-waste is growing five times faster than formal recycling collection rates since 2010, based on a report by the UN’s 2024 Global E-waste Monitor.

“I’ve been living this for 25-plus years now. We are moving in the right direction, but more action is needed,” Fredrik Forslund, vice president and general manager, international, at Blancco and director of the International Data Sanitization Consortium, said in an interview.

Forslund sees progress in the form of users trading in for second-hand smartphones and PCs to extend their lives rather than buying new equipment; technology that efficiently monitors climate data along with the product-cycle management; and heightened awareness among companies to be viewed through the lens of being a responsible corporate citizen.

A vast majority (88%) of businesses rate environmental sustainability as a “high to moderate influence” on their approach to processing end-of-life (EOL) data management in a global survey of 1,800. Still, more than a third (39%) have yet to implement a plan to reduce their data footprint, leaving them at risk of compliance failures.

Several companies have stepped up sustainability solutions:

Lenovo Intelligent Sustainability Solutions Advisor program provides enterprises with a much clearer end-to-end path for their fleet of devices at the end of their useful life.

— HP Renew offers refurbished HP Inc. high-quality PCs and laptops with the same reliability and performance as new HP products, but for a significantly lower price. HP has a rigorous refurbishment process where every drive is wiped clean of any data and every disk is separately overwritten.

— Earlier this year, IBM Corp. expanded its sustainability portfolio to help customers reduce their IT carbon footprint while focusing on efficiency and performance throughout the lifecycle of their datacenter infrastructure.

Nonetheless, a previous report, “Data at a Distance,” shows nearly two-thirds (65%) of organizations said the switch to the cloud has increased the volume of “redundant, obsolete, or trivial data they collect.”

This, in turn, has created a financial and environmental challenge for businesses, with two thirds (66%) of health care and financial services organizations concerned about rising energy costs and the impact on storing large quantities of data.