Electronic Waste
Sixty million tonnes a year of toxic waste, mostly dismantled by hand.
Severity score
38.4
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Only around a fifth of electronic waste is formally recycled. The rest is landfilled or dismantled informally, exposing workers and children to lead, mercury and dioxins from open burning. Volumes are rising far faster than recycling capacity.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
18Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
42People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
34Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
62Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
64Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.