Abstract
The growing amount of electronic waste (e-waste) poses considerable risks to the environment and human health, especially when treated inadequately. However, it is difficult to assess the significance of these issues without quantitative understanding of spatiotemporal patterns of e-waste generation. This paper proposes a new model to estimate in-use stock of electric household appliances (HAs) and e-waste generation at the level of 1km×1km grids by coupling geographic information system (GIS) and material flow analysis (MFA). We took Xiamen, a rapidly urbanized city in China, as a case and the results showed that demands for HAs increased from 1980, peaked in 2016, and then declined. In-use HAs exhibited a logistic growth and significantly increased in both spatial extent and intensity. E-waste generation kept rising until 2019, and its spatial center expanded outward from downtown to suburban areas. Our study highlights that a dynamic and spatial model is useful for designing effective policies for e-waste management by providing spatiotemporal details of e-waste types and generation magnitudes and explicitly recognizing generation hotspots in cities.
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