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by kyriakos 658 days ago
Plastic in a laptop you replace every 3 years is hardly anything like plastic waste coming out of a household. My family produces many times as much plastic waste every month just by shopping food and cleaning supplies at a supermarket and eventually getting rid of the packaging.
1 comments

It's not nothing though:

50 million tons of e-waste yearly, https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/waste...

Apple sells 21.9 million units/year: https://www.statista.com/topics/10435/apple-mac/

Large distances are covered with tiny steps.

E-waste is generally considered a separate category than plastic, as it contains small amounts of a lot of useful, hard to mine metals - much of which is in the chips, but also the lithium in the batteries. And many of those metals are toxic if ingested so we need to keep them out of the soil and water.

Recycling those is probably far more valuable than recycling plastic, pound per pound. We just make so much plastic.