AS the world confronts a growing e-waste crisis, Lenovo, a US$69-billion-revenue global technology powerhouse listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has joined hands with the United Nations to promote the circular economy that features, among other things, responsible electronics management.

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) announced on July 9 that it has formalized a strategic collaboration with the tech giant to accelerate global initiatives that support the circular economy.

“We look forward to working together on technical cooperation and capacity-building operations across the world,” said Ciyong Zou, deputy to the director general and managing director of the Directorate of Technical Cooperation and Sustainable Industrial Development at UNIDO. “As the UN’s specialized agency for industrial development, engagement with the private sector is key; Lenovo’s commitment to sustainable industrialization fully aligns with UNIDO’s vision for circular global supply chains in the electronics sector and beyond.”

The latest collaboration comes at a time when the world is increasingly aware of the harm of e-waste and the benefits of its more efficient reuse.

Last year, the UN released the most recent edition of the Global E-waste Monitor, noting that the world’s generation of electronic waste was rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling. To put that into perspective, the 62 million tons of e-waste generated in 2022 would fill 1.55 million 40-ton trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-to-bumper line encircling the equator.

The UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024 further noted that less than one-quarter (22.3 percent) of the e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US$62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for while increasing pollution risks.

The report warned that the annual generation of e-waste worldwide was rising by 2.6 million tons annually and was on track to reach 82 million tons by 2030, up a further 33 percent from the 2022 figure.

E-waste, any discarded product with a plug or battery, may contain not only valuable elements such as gold and copper that should be properly recycled, but also hazardous substances like mercury which can harm people’s health. Therefore, it’s urgent for everyone to join hands and help recycle e-waste, whether it’s for economic reasons or out of health concerns.

In its July 9 announcement, UNIDO acknowledged Lenovo’s effort to accelerate environmental progress through its participation in the circular economy, including the continued use of closed-loop recycled materials in its products.

One may find a number of details about how Lenovo goes about recycling in the company’s fiscal year 2024/25 ESG report released in June. ESG stands for environmental, social and governance.

For example, the report points out: “Lenovo supports the use of recycled plastics, including ocean-bound plastics (OBP), to reduce consumption of virgin materials and to help support a circular economy. In 2019, the packaging team began researching the possibility of using OBP in product packaging and launched the first packaging cushion containing OBP (30 percent OBP and 70 percent other recycled plastics) in ThinkPad L14 packaging.”

At the same time, as we find in the latest Lenovo ESG report, the use of bamboo or sugar cane fibers in select products has marked the launch of a new era of packaging offerings for Lenovo. The report explains that bamboo fiber has many favorable features, including being recyclable alongside paper and cardboard.

More importantly, Lenovo has predicted in its latest ESG report that 100 percent of its PC products will contain post-consumer recycled content materials (excluding tablets and accessories) by fiscal year 2025/26.

In an interview with Sustainability Magazine in 2023, Mary Jacques, executive director of Global ESG and Regulatory Compliance at Lenovo, also predicted that, by 2025, the PC maker will enable the recycling and reuse of 363 million kilograms of end-of-life products and ensure 76 percent of repairable PC parts returned to the company’s service centers will be repaired for future use.

Certainly, there’s always room for improvement in any company’s effort to reduce waste by promoting repair, reuse and recycling. But Lenovo’s collaboration with UNIDO, based in part on the former’s current achievement, surely can help many developing countries embrace a circular economy in many ways.

Collective efforts

Not just Lenovo, many other Chinese companies like Xiaomi and GEM (Green Eco-Manufacture) have also contributed to the circular economy in the electronics sector.

Xiaomi, now the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, has steadily thrown itself behind recycling of used items. It has set a target to recycle a total of 38,000 tons of e-waste over a five-year period (2022-2026). In its latest ESG report released in April, the company said it had fulfilled 95.94 percent of this target by the end of 2024.

In a section dedicated to the circular economy on Xiaomi’s official site, one can find how much e-waste had been recycled in 2022, 2023 and 2024, respectively. According to Xiaomi’s statistics, the company had recycled 4,500 tons of e-waste in 2022, 12,260 tons in 2023, and 19,698 tons in 2024, signaling a growing momentum.

Its latest ESG report also shows that many recycled materials have been integrated into new products. For example, the back cover of the Xiaomi 14T smartphone uses a bio-based material derived from lemon residue, with half of its polyurethane sourced from bio-based raw materials.

Xiaomi is one of the Chinese firms that have joined the Circular Electronics in China project launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with other partners in 2017. In an updated report published on its website this June, the WEF says the project aims at helping companies in China reduce and recycle 50 percent of e-waste by 2025.

In a news report published last year, Chinese broadcaster CGTN noted: “As the world’s largest mobile phone consumer market, China is expected to have 6 billion used mobile phones by 2025. This creates huge opportunities for the circular economy. At the same time, the Chinese government has placed high expectations on the electronic recycling industry.”

As the WEF noted, many big-name companies operating in the country have participated in the Circular Electronics in China project, including Xiaomi, All Things Renew Group, GEM, JD, Huawei and Oppo.

As early as in 2023, MIT Technology Review, which was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States in 1899, had listed GEM as a major climate tech to watch because of the company’s great ability to recycle electronics and batteries. GEM was established in 2001 with its headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.

“GEM’s versatile factories can dismantle different kinds of batteries, and its hydrometallurgical extraction techniques are more effective at removing critical materials than competitors’ methods. For example, GEM can recycle over 90% of lithium from used batteries and extract nickel from materials that contain less than 0.1% of the metal,” MIT Technology Review noted.

In April, reporters from overseas Chinese media outlets, including those from Canada, Japan and Venezuela, visited GEM’s new material company in Hubei Province. The media outlet from Venezuela (pandavennews.com) reported that GEM now recycles more than 10 percent of China’s discarded small batteries.

The list of Chinese companies dedicated to e-waste management can go on and on.

For example, if you look at All Things Renew, a recycling giant founded in 2011, you might be a bit surprised to find that such a “young” firm’s achievement in recycling e-waste has been recognized by the UN.

Last year, the company’s practice of promoting a circular economy in the second-hand consumer electronics sector was included in the United Nations Global Compact’s leading cases of sustainable corporate development.

Concrete steps

Every individual company’s effort matters, especially when such effort meshes with the UN’s call for promoting green industrialization.

Ruediger Kuehr, a senior manager at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and an adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick (Ireland), said recently that “concrete steps” are urgently needed to reduce e-waste, especially at a time when many people in today’s society use multiple computers and phones, an ever-growing number of new appliances, monitors and sensors, e-bikes, e-scooters, clothes, toys and furniture with embedded electronics.

Indeed, when an individual enterprise takes concrete steps to help enhance global green growth, the whole world stands to gain.