Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. I'm Libby Peak, head of resource policy at Green Alliance. And one area of resource use that Green Alliance has long been

interested in is electronics and electronic waste. As part of our ongoing interest in the area,

recently we held an event along with Material Focus, which runs the Recycle Your Electricals campaign

to explore the issue. And I'm delighted to be joined by Scott Butler, Executive Director of Material

Focus today, to reflect on what

we discussed at the event. Scott, welcome to the podcast and thank you very much for joining us.

Hello, Libby. Thanks for having me.

So the title of our event was, are we taking e-waste seriously enough? And I kicked off the

event on the evening with a series of statistics that I would say prove we're not. The first one was

that the UK actually produces the second highest amount of electronic waste per person per year in the

world. That's 23.9 kilograms against a global average of 7.3 kilograms per person per year and actually

an EU average of just 16.2 kilograms per person per year. Perhaps most shocking thing I think

we actually produce more electronic waste than the US where they've notoriously got quite large

electronics. But the thing that concerns us most at Green Alliance is that this large

pile of waste that we see at the end of the process is just the tip of the iceberg, as every

item that winds up in this pile has left behind it a trail of waste and emissions. So if you take a

typical smartphone, for instance, each one requires 12,760 litres of water to manufacture, which is the equivalent of 160 baths

worth of water. And the 75 grams of metal it contains requires mining through at least 6.5 kilograms

of ore. And the manufacturing process releases 60 kilograms of CO2 emissions, which is actually

300 times the weight of the phone itself.

For our circular economy task force a couple years ago, we wanted to know how large an impact

that has if you scale it up across the country. And we found that the manufacturing of the phones

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