The number

One drawer is a curiosity. Here is the scale.

Every figure below comes from the UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by UNITAR and the ITU. It is the standard reference for this, and it is where you should point anyone who asks where you got your numbers.

62 million tonnes

In 2022 the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste.

That number is difficult to hold, so anchor it: it is up 82% from 2010. Not 82% over a century. 82% in twelve years — roughly a school career.

And the curve is still climbing. On the current trajectory the figure reaches 82 million tonnes by 2030. That is the projection to argue with if you think this problem is solving itself.

22.3%

Of those 62 million tonnes, the share formally collected and recycled was 22.3%.

Slightly more than a fifth. Which means that for roughly every four devices thrown out, three go somewhere that isn't a documented recycling facility — landfill, incineration, storage, or the informal processing routes that Module 2 covers.

This is the figure worth leading with, because most people assume recycling is the default and the exception is the person who couldn't be bothered. It is the other way round.

$91 billion, and $19 billion

The materials inside that 62 million tonnes were worth about $91 billion.

Of that, roughly $19 billion was recovered.

The difference — around $72 billion — was not destroyed. Metal does not cease to exist. It was dispersed: buried in landfill, scattered as slag, burned off, or diluted into mixed scrap too contaminated to separate economically.

That is the closest thing this subject has to a single summarising number. It is not primarily an environmental statistic. It is an accounting one, and that is what makes it useful in a room full of people who don't respond to environmental statistics.

What 22.3% means for your drawer

Take the count from your household audit and apply the collection rate to it. Roughly one device in five, historically, has ended up somewhere that keeps records. The rest went to landfill, to a shed, to a scrapyard with no paperwork, or to a country that never agreed to receive it.

That is not a prediction about your devices specifically. It is the base rate, and base rates are what individual decisions push against. Every device that goes to a documented recycler instead of a bin moves a real number, in a real year, by a real amount — a tiny amount, but the 22.3% figure is nothing more than several hundred million tiny amounts added up.

The reason to know the number is not to feel small next to it. It is to know which direction you are pushing, and roughly how hard.

How to use these numbers

Three rules, and they matter more than the figures.

Cite them. Always say "UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024". A number without a source is an opinion, and one person checking and finding nothing costs you every other number you have said.

Don't inflate them. They are already dramatic. Rounding 62 up to "nearly 70" to make a point is how credible people become non-credible people.

Localise them. 62 million tonnes is abstract. The count from your own household audit is not. Move between the two — the global figure gives the problem scale, and the local one gives it a handle.

Where the numbers stop

Be honest about the limits. These are estimates built from trade statistics, sales data, and modelled product lifespans. Countries measure differently and some barely measure at all. The informal sector is by definition undocumented — which means the true collection rate is arguable in both directions.

The uncertainty doesn't rescue the conclusion. Whether the real figure is 20% or 25%, the shape is the same: most electronics are not formally recycled, and the volume is rising faster than the recycling.

Next: why it's growing.