Sustainability 101: What is e-waste?

Do you feel a bit lost when people refer to certain environmental sustainability topics and aren’t sure where to start when it comes to learning more? Sustainability 101 is a blog series that you can turn to for information about different environmental terms that may come up at work, during discussions with friends, and even at your annual holiday gathering.

We’ve all been there: you have an electronic product that is no longer working, like your favorite headphones. Instead of helping you listen to music, they have now become what is sometimes referred to as “e-waste.”

What is e-waste and why it matters

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), e-waste is a term “often used to describe used electronics that are nearing the end of their useful life, and are discarded, donated or given to a recycler. Though e-waste is the commonly used term, EPA considers e-waste to be a subset of used electronics and recognizes the inherent value of these materials that can be reused, refurbished or recycled to minimize the actual waste that might end up in a landfill or improperly disposed in an unprotected dump site either in the US or abroad.”

The European Commission explains that “E-waste contains a complex mixture of materials, some of which are hazardous. These can cause major environmental and health problems if the discarded devices are not managed properly.”

In addition, according to the European Commission, “Modern electronics also contain rare and expensive resources, including critical raw materials. These can be recycled and re-used if the waste is effectively managed. Improving the collection, treatment and recycling of electrical and electronic equipment at the end of their life can increase resource efficiency and support the shift to a circular economy. It can also contribute to the security of supply for critical raw materials.”

How much e-waste is there?

The United Nations (UN) Global E-waste Monitor 2024 reports that “a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was produced in 2022 — Up 82% from 2010; on track to raise another 32%, to 82 million tonnes, in 2030.”

Further, according to the UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024, “less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as being properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US$ 62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.”

To evolve to a circular economy, there is a need to be much more efficient with our resources, and an important aspect of that is collectively working on reclaiming the valuable raw materials in e-waste.

How can e-waste be reduced?

To reduce e-waste, we need to increase the number of products that are returned to companies that can reuse, remanufacture, resell, or properly recycle them. This concept is often known as “product takeback” when products are returned to the manufacturer for responsible reuse or recycling.

Environmentally-sound management (ESM) of e-waste can help advance environmental sustainability in the tech sector and minimize environmental impacts. Industry – working with multiple stakeholder groups, including recyclers – has done a lot to improve the ESM of e-waste.

What is Cisco doing?

One of the key priorities of our next generation environmental sustainability strategy, The Plan for Possible, is evolving to a regenerative, circular model.

Cisco aims to transform our business to extend the useful life of our products and provide ongoing services.

We are embedding circularity into how we design our products and packaging. This means designing to enable reuse, minimize environmental impacts, drive innovation, and realize value for our stakeholders. We are deploying new offerings that help Cisco, and our customers, capture more value throughout a product’s life, such as payment solutions and as-a-service models designed with circularity in mind.

Cisco created Circular Design Principles, which are considered throughout the company’s new product development process so our product and packaging designs can adopt a more circular approach. We have a goal to incorporate Circular Design Principles into 100% of new Cisco products and packaging by our fiscal year 2025 and we are working with our internal engineering and supply chain teams, and our suppliers, to execute on them.

And we are striving to minimize waste and extend the lifecycle of our products by recapturing hardware and redeploying those assets through remanufacture, reuse, and recycling. Cisco’s Takeback and Reuse Program is a service that we offer free of charge to our customers and partners and we reuse or recycle nearly 100% of the products that are returned to us. The service helps customers support circular economy efforts.

We also realize how important it is to involve our employees in the circular economy. Cisco’s annual Recycle IT Day takes place at multiple Cisco campus locations, usually around Earth Day. Since Cisco started holding these events in 1995 through our fiscal year 2023, our employees and contractors have helped recycle 3283 metric tonnes of used electronics.

In order to evolve toward a circular economy, there is a need for value chains to collaborate in the process – including customers returning their used products, partners leading conversations about circularity in business models, and suppliers advancing sustainability in materials used in products.

Learn more about Cisco’s initiatives, goals and/or commitments, and our latest impact, on our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) Reporting Hub and on Cisco’s Product Takeback and Reuse website.

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