Electronic Waste

4Approach for Estimating e-Waste Generation

Amit Kumar

University of British Columbia, NBK Institute of Mining Engineering, 6350 Stores Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

4.1 Background

Estimation of the amount of e-waste generated every year is one of the challenging processes for designing any recycling or disposal practices. The success of an e-waste recycling or disposal facility depends on the annual throughput to plant. Without a constant throughput to the facility, the plant will have to go through larger downtime due to unavailability of the input feedstock. Hence, it is important to quantify the e-waste generation statistics accurately that in turn will help the recycling/disposal facilities to size their plant capacity and equipment dimensions properly to reduce the overall downtime. The proper estimation of e-waste generation in given region also helps understand the severity of the issue and helps the concerning authorities to formulate proper action plan to tackle the e-waste problem. There have been several studies to estimate the e-waste generation. This chapter lists the most common methods for predicting the total e-waste generated in any calendar year.

4.2 Econometric Analysis

Kusch et al. (2017) studied the relation of waste generation and gross domestic product (GDP) for 50 countries of the pan-European region. It was shown that GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) has a linear dependency with e-waste generated per capita (coefficient ...