[dolanbaker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32353659
Old kitchen, bathroom and laundry equipment made up 60% of the 41.8 million tonnes of electronic waste thrown away in 2014, suggests a report.

Written by researchers from UN University it details how much e-waste different regions discard.

Old microwaves, washing machines, dishwashers and other household items made up the bulk of the waste.

Only 16% of the items discarded found their way into proper recycling and re-use schemes.
Urban mine

The report found the US was the nation which disposed of most electronic waste with 7,072 kilotonnes generated in 2014. China was second (6,032 kilotonnes) and Japan third (2,200 kilotonnes).

....

The report said rising levels of discarded electronic equipment were being driven by the growing popularity of domestic electronics and because many modern devices did not last as long as older versions of the same products.

There's your problem, life limited & unserviceable products going to landfill unnecessarily early!

[yellowcanoe]

It's not all doom and gloom. Desktop machines are not being replaced as frequently because older machines are generally still capable of running todays loads and new machines don't provide as much of a performance boost as they used to. Our central computing department is further extending the life of their public lab machines by replacing the original hard drives with solid state drives. My department has switched to using VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) thin clients in both of our teaching labs. The thin clients are about the size of a pocket book, contain no moving parts, consume a fraction of power required by a desktop machine and should have a much longer usable life than any desktop machine. Any new desktop machines we purchase would be small form factor machines and flat panel monitors use less materials and have a longer usable life than CRT monitors. Over the last 7 years I've sent hundreds of tower units and CRT monitors off to be recycled. In the future I expect the amount and volume of items I need to recycle to be substantially smaller.

I would agree that washing machines and dryers don't have as long a life as they used to.

[dolanbaker]

Yes, It was primarily the white goods shortened life expectancy that I was referring to as elsewhere in the article it states that computer & mobile phone waste is only " Only 7% of the global e-waste mountain is made up of phones, computers and printers ". As you correctly state that in IT (I work in IT as well) the hardware lasts much longer these days, the arms race (cpu speed, RAM & hard disk space) is over.

[PrestonSturges]

Appliances have those pumps, motors, and compressors which have very short life spans. All made in China BTW.

[upandown]

In Norway, each inhabitant did away with about 28.4kg of electronic waste, found the report. Across Africa levels of e-waste generated per inhabitant were lower at 1.7kg per person.

It is a question of classification: appliances are heavier than mobile phones, most of the weight though is metal. Washing machines even have a brick in them to keep them more stable.

Cars are not counted as e-waste, even though they have plenty of electronics now and are not that different from a dishwasher.