A customer looks at Apple iPhone 14 Pro smartphones at an Apple store in Sydney, Australia, on Friday, 16 September 2022. 
Boosting recycling will require cleaning out some closets, though. One survey by the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Forum of 8,755 households in Europe found that a single household contains 74 electronic devices on average — from phones to laptops to toasters — 13 of which are not in use but kept around for potential reuse, repair, resale or sentimental reasons. Mobile phones are particularly susceptible to what the UNITAR researchers describe as device “hoarding,” along with headphones, remote controls, clocks, irons, external hard drives, routers, keyboards and mice.
“People tend not to realize that all these seemingly insignificant items have a lot of value, and together at a global level represent massive volumes,” said Pascal Leroy, director general of the WEEE Forum, in a statement. "It is very easy for [small e-waste items] to accumulate unused and unnoticed in households, or to be tossed into the ordinary garbage bin.”
Baldé says that the urban mine of e-waste — approximately 54 million metric tons today — is going to double in the next three decades.
The European Union’s rate of e-waste recovery, at 55%, is significantly higher than in the rest of the world, due in part to decades of legislation. Member states have strict weight-based e-waste collection targets, which tend to skew toward heavier objects, contributing to the conundrum of hoarded phones.
"Having legislation is the first requisite,” Baldé told Bloomberg. Legislation provides financial incentives for consumers and companies to develop collection systems, ensuring that recovered devices arrive at compliant channels. “For the first time in history, the growth in the collection of e-waste has been faster than the growth of the mountain of e-waste in the European Union,” Baldé said.
In the US, there is no nationally regulated e-waste management system, but some states and companies have their own collection schemes. Apple, for example, routed 38,000 metric tons of electronic waste to recycling in its 2021 fiscal year, according to the company’s environmental progress report, and was able to repurpose materials like copper and gold. Samsung recycles 100 million pounds of e-waste each year, said Mark Newton, the company’s head of North America corporate sustainability, upcycling a portion of old Galaxy phones into childcare monitors and low-cost medical diagnosis cameras. Customers of both companies can also hand in their old phones for discounts, or buy refurbished phones at a discounted price.
“We want consumers to rethink that journey of their devices,” Newton said. “Because even if they’re ready for a new one, the old one still has plenty of life to give.”