Production and Management of E-Waste

Running head: PRODUCTON AND MANAGEMENT OF E-WASTE
PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF E-WASTE
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1PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF E-WASTE
How much e-waste do these countries produce?
Electronic waste, abbreviated as ‘e-waste’, comprises of the electrical or
electronic appliances and devices which have been disposed. These include
discarded keyboards, scanners, monitors, cables, mice, video cameras, clocks,
flashlights, lamps, phones, calculators, circuit boards and DVD or CD players
(Kumar, Holuszko and Espinosa 2017). As evident from the given figure (Figure
1), the countries who are primarily leading in their production of e-waste are
China (7.2 million metric tonnes) and the United States (6.3 million metric
tonnes). Some of the major reasons which have contributed to such a high
production of e-waste in countries like China include: a rapid economical growth
across the nation and a gradual increase in the demand for using electronic
appliances across the population (Fu
et al. 2018). Indeed, the rapid increase in
the demand and usage of e-waste across households in China, from 20, 000 to
almost 10, 000, through the years 1985 to 2014, is evident in the given figures
(Figure 2) and hence, reflects the association between population growth and e-
waste generation in the nation as reported by the China Household Electric
Appliance Research Institute (Hao 2017).
China is also a major importer of e-waste from various nations worldwide, hence
contributing to its large e-waste production, comprising of domestic as well as
international sources. A major contributor to these imports is interestingly, the
United States, which has been estimated to export 10 to 50% of its e-waste to
nations which are undergoing rapid economically development (Tansel 2017).
Figure 2: Quantities of domestic electronic appliances owned by households in
Figure 1: Showing the top 10 countries by the amount of