The average UAE resident is producing almost 30kg a year of electrical waste in the form of old and discarded gadgets and appliances, according to new United Nations-supported research released yesterday.
With the world's population increasingly quick to discard everything from refrigerators and TVs to mobile phones and computers, the global volume of so-called e-waste is set to grow by almost a third between 2012 and 2017, according to the StEP Initiative - a UN-backed effort to minimise the unsound disposal of electronic goods.
E-waste is defined as any discarded item with a battery or a cord and there was a total of 44.4 million tonnes of it last year according to the initiative's latest report - and that will rise by 33 per cent to 59.3 million tonnes by 2017.
If you're having trouble visualising that much electrical junk, its gurus helpfully point out that it is the equivalent of "a line of 40-tonne trucks end-to-end stretching three-quarters of the Equator or the same weight as "about 200 Empire State Buildings.
And UAE residents could do their bit to curb this rapidly growing gadget mountain. The StEP initiative has published an 'e-waste map' where it tries to log the amount of e-waste produced in countries around the world.
While admitting that such data can be difficult to compile, the initiative's experts say the world produced 7kg of e-waste for every one of its seven billion inhabitants last year.
But in the UAE residents are producing a substantially larger volume of e-waste. According to figures published with the e-waste map, they each produced an average of 29.28kg of such refuse last year.
That's marginally less than the 29.78kg a head being discarded by citizens of the United States but comfortably more than the 23.23kg of e-waste produced per head of population in Germany or the 21.8kg thrown out in the United Kingdom. And its almost six times the 5.36kg per head produced by the country that makes so many of our electrical items - China.
Little wonder the world's e-waste is growing at such a rate when, according to Nadeem Khanzadah, head of retail for UAE retailer Jumbo Electronics, for some consumers the average life of a phone or tablet is now "eight or nine months".
He told 7DAYS yesterday that his firm sometimes offers customers the chance to trade in older models of phones and computers as a means to purchase the latest upgrade and that a third-party then collects the older gadgets for distribution in emerging markets.
© 7Days 2013
