Assessing historic material losses in European waste from electrical and electronic equipment

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is the EU’s fastest-growing waste stream. Rapid innovation and changing product types result in highly variable material compositions, complicating collection, pre-treatment, and recovery. We analyze the outflow quantity of 59 temporally changing elements across 54 products in the EU-27 from 2006 to 2021, quantifying country- and product-specific contributions. We estimate post-use element losses in collection, sorting, and recovery and find that 33 million tons (56%) of the cumulative element mass is not collected, making insufficient formal collection the main driver of losses. A further 9% cumulative quantity is removed during pre-treatment, and overall only 28% are recovered. Specialty elements exhibit the lowest recovery rates, mainly due to missing recycling technologies. Sixteen products, such as flat panel monitors, desktop PCs, and household luminaires, contain particularly high element quantities. Prioritizing recovery from these products could reduce EU geopolitical dependence, close circular economy gaps, and lower environmental emissions.