Toxic Tech: Making our lives easier at the cost of the planet

Electronic waste, or E-Waste, refers to discarded electronic and electrical goods. This encompasses everything from large household and commercial appliances, like home batteries, fridges, and air conditioners, medium-sized appliances like computers, blenders, and toasters, to small handheld or wearable devices—such as phones, smart watches, light-up clothing, and children’s toys.

While these products may enhance our daily lives, they contain a mix of both valuable and hazardous elements, the production and disposal of which poses serious risks to human and environmental health. Both the volume and speed in which we produce and dispose of these items is a significant problem. Overproduction and overconsumption from affluent households is now recognised as among the most significant drivers of environmental social harms worldwide.¹ Australians are among the worst offenders: we currently rank as the fourth-largest producer of e-waste per capita globally.²

Today’s generation faces a triple planetary crisis of climate disruption; nature & biodiversity loss; and pollution and waste.³ Each crisis is exacerbated by the unnecessary consumption of short-lived, poorly designed electronics. The ever growing demand for new products fuels additional mining and refinement of raw materials, putting further pressure on the natural environment.

E-waste contains valuable mineral resources including pressure metals, base metals and rare earth elements, that if recovered, could drastically reduced reliance on additional and destructive mining. Of the 600 million kilograms of e-waste generated by Australians in the financial year ending 2024⁴ only around half was collected for recycling.⁵

The Hidden Costs of E-waste
It’s not just the volume of waste that matters—carbon costs, chemical emissions and leaching into the environment can occur throughout the entire life cycle of electronic products, from production to disposal.⁶ 

Upstream Impacts:
The extraction and processing of materials for electronics come at enormous environmental cost. Establishing and expanding mine sites often leads to wildlife and habitat loss. Mining and refinement of raw materials has impacts on carbon emissions, eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity, photochemical oxidation, ozone depletion, particulate matter formation, and water scarcity.⁷ Sedimentation,⁸ acid drainage⁹ and metal depositions¹⁰ degrades local and connected aquatic ecosystems.¹¹ Cobalt, lithium, zinc, nickel and other rare earth elements commonly used in electronic and electrical goods, have been linked to environmental and human rights concerns.¹² Hazardous waste from mining and production of minerals, particularly cobalt, has been demonstrated to leach into the local environment,¹³ with exposure evidenced in biomonitoring of children in the area.¹⁴

Downstream Impacts
The greatest downstream environmental risks arise from incorrect disposal of heavy metals and manufactured chemicals, particularly Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) including brominated flame retardants and Poly- and perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS). In addition, products containing lithium-ion batteries, either loose, or embedded within electronic products represent and additional fire and explosion risk, creating additional harmful pollutants while burning.¹⁵

A number of these heavy metals and POPs are known carcinogens, teratogens, and mutagens. Many of these substances do not break down, leading to bioaccumulation in animals and biomagnification up the food chain— reportedly reaching concentrations of up to a million times higher than in surrounding environments.¹⁶

E-waste becomes even more hazardous when mixed with industrial or municipal waste in landfills, as chemical interactions in leachate create complex and unpredictable pollutant mixtures—a phenomenon known as the “cocktail effect” or mixture toxicity. In landfill, when mixed with municipal waste, the composition of leachate becomes more complex by the process of dissolution of pollutants.¹⁷ This risk can be mitigated if ewaste is kept separate from other waste streams, and repaired and recycled safely.

Both repair and recycling have risks. Improper handling and processing of e-waste may lead contaminants entering the human food chain as well as the environment through water, air and soil.¹⁸ Studies have demonstrated contamination of soil and air water around poorly managed e-waste facilities in China and India,¹⁹ and significantly elevated levels of dangerous heavy metals in blood and urine samples of e-waste workers in west Africa.²⁰

Recycling is also an energy intensive and oftentimes expensive process; without producers contributing to the cost required to safely recover these materials, and support for the growth of markets for material recovered from these processes, recycling may not be financially viable. By far the greatest opportunity to reduce waste and pollution arising from ewaste is to design out the waste in the first place. Design improvements can reduce reliance on harmful chemicals, make use of recycled materials, increase durability, improve repairability, promote second life use, and make products and component materials easier to identify and disassemble to streamline recycling. 

While technological advances may make our lives easier, we need to ensure all steps are taken to reduce the risk to human and environmental health, and ensure those that profit from producing and selling electronic goods actively focus on design improvements, support sustainable product lifecycles, and pay their fair share towards mitigate the environmental risks they create.