[gmiller123456]

I didn't see a reference to $53B in the article. Just a reference to £40 ($53B US) per year, which would directly negate the $53B just for Dec 2017. And that £40 estimate includes "all recoverable materials".

If there is as estimate somewhere about $53B per month of e-waste. That sounds a lot like they're basing that on the purchase price, not the value when it's discarded. And that's a pretty useless valuation, as it simplifies to how much money is spent per month, since everything will eventually become waste.

Taking the entire food industry as an example, if you consider only the purchase price, then the entire industry is 100% waste over a very short period of time. In fact, you could argue that it's even more than 100% waste, since people will actually pay to have the waste removed.

Before you call something "waste", to have any practical meaning at all, you need to subtract off the value it provided to the consumer. Since that's really hard to do, I can see a journalist just using the purchase price to make a dramatic headline, rather than producing any useful information.

[markovian]

It is $53B for 2017, recorded in December 2017.