The Link between e-Waste and GDP—New Insights from Data from the Pan-European Region

Sigrid Kusch,Colin D Hills

doi:10.3390/resources6020015

Abstract

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is difficult to sustainably manage. One key issue is the challenge of planning for WEEE flows as current and future quantities of waste are difficult to predict. To address this, WEEE generation and gross domestic product (GDP) data from 50 countries of the pan-European region were assessed. A high economic elasticity was identified, indicating that WEEE and GDP are closely interlinked. More detailed analyses revealed that GDP at purchasing power parity (GDP PPP) is a more meaningful measure when looking at WEEE flows, as a linear dependency between WEEE generation and GDP PPP was identified. This dependency applies to the whole region, regardless of the economic developmental stage of individual countries. In the pan-European region, an increase of 1000 international $ GDP PPP means an additional 0.5 kg WEEE is generated that requires management.

Highlights

The sustainable management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-waste, is one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st century [1,2]
When assuming that the regression line passes through the origin, The findings suggest that if gross domestic product (GDP) Purchasing power parity (PPP) is known, WEEE generation can be calculated the correlation is described by the equation of the linear regression in Figure 2: through a simple linear correlation
WEEE is characterized by high economic elasticity, meaning economic growth will result in a corresponding increase in e-waste

Summary

Introduction

The sustainable management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-waste, is one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st century [1,2]. WEEE contains both hazardous and precious components, and is a rapidly growing waste stream [3,4,5]. The responsible collection and recycling of WEEE reduces environmental harm [6,7] and facilitates the recovery of valuable materials [8,9,10], including rare earth elements and other critical raw materials (e.g., indium and gallium) that are of vital importance for modern economies [11,12,13,14]. The recycling of WEEE is a complex task requiring an effective technical infrastructure and managerial framework [15,16], and it has potential to generate significant economic wealth from recovered rare and important metals [12,17,18]. It should be noted that large quantities of WEEE are subject to complex transboundary movements that result from both legal and illegal activities [20,21,22], and flows from high-income countries to low- or middle-income countries can create risk to human health and the environment, especially when low-standard rudimentary methods are used to process

Methods

Results

Conclusion