Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-General
WSIS Forum - Joint UN Workshop on "Towards building effective partnership for sustainable management of e-waste": Welcome Remarks
5 May 2016, Geneva, Switzerland
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good afternoon and welcome to this Workshop on Building Effective Partnerships for Sustainable Management of E-waste.
Your presence here today is a reflection of the important and universal concern that we share on managing e-waste.
I would also like to thank our distinguished speakers from the UN family for being with us today.
E-waste is generated by a wide variety of obsolete and discarded ICT devices. While these devices have brought us the benefit of new innovative technologies, they have also inflicted us with the burden of growing quantities of e-waste - a "self-created evil".
The situation is worsened by the frequent updating and upgrading of personal devices and people constantly clamoring for the newest and latest devices.
E-waste is now one of the most rapidly growing environmental problems in both developing and developed countries.
In 2014, nearly 41.8 million metric tons of e-waste was generated and this is expected to grow to 50 million metric tons by 2018. The increasing incidents of indiscriminate e-waste dumping is the incentive for responsible management of discarded ICT devices worldwide.
Which leads us to the title of this workshop.
How can we all work together to build effective partnerships to tackle this evil?
To enable better recycling we need standards and policy that set requirements for disassembly and material separation, avoidance of glue and welding, and labeling of the materials used in a product.
This is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, especially the targets under Goal 12 on responsible consumption and production, the WSIS Action Line C.7 on e-environment, and the ITU's "Connect 2020 Agenda" which calls for minimizing the negative impact of ICTs on the environment, in particular by reducing the volume of redundant e-waste by 50% by 2020.
The relevant UN agencies need to work together and I am pleased to say we are doing so. ITU, the Secretariat of the Basel Convention, the Basel Convention Regional Centre for South America, UNU, WHO, WIPO, UNIDO, ECLAC and UNESCO have developed a report outlining the state of e-waste management in Latin America. This report offers guidance on the steps to be taken towards environmentally sustainable e-waste management, and is being launched at this session. The report in English and Spanish is freely available for download on the ITU website and will be briefly presented by Cristina Bueti.
ITU has also proposed to the UN Environmental Management Group the creation of an Issue Management Group to enhance coordination on e-waste within the UN system.
As an international standards developing organization, ITU also continues to develop standards on rare metal recycling from discarded ICT devices. The recovery of precious metals and critical materials from these products represents a significant economic opportunity but often missed. For example, ton of gold ore yields just 5 g of gold, whereas a ton of used mobile phones yields a staggering 400 g of gold!
ITU through its ITU-T Study Group 5 has developed Guidelines for countries to establish sustainable e-waste management programmes and e-waste policies.
So I will close by inviting you all to work together with us to rid the planet of this scourge.
I wish you a very enjoyable and fruitful session ahead.
Thank you.
