Indicators

Generation of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)

WEEE refers to electronic waste generated from outdated or decommissioned blockchain-related hardware, such as mining rigs, GPUs, and validation nodes.

• In PoW networks, mining hardware (ASICs) typically has a lifespan of around five years before it becomes obsolete or unprofitable.
• In PoS networks, validators and nodes run on general-purpose computing hardware, such as servers or cloud-based infrastructure, with a replacement cycle of about three years.
• The calculation involves estimating hardware turnover rates, total device weight, and overall network equipment usage.

Non-recycled WEEE Ratio

This indicator measures the percentage of electronic waste that is not recycled.

• The assessment relies on regional e-waste recycling rates, which vary by country.
• Blockchain networks with geographically dispersed operations pose challenges in estimating exact recycling rates, so proxies from national and industry-level reports are used.
• Countries with stricter environmental regulations tend to have higher recycling rates, influencing the overall estimate.

Generation of Hazardous Waste

Hazardous waste is a subset of WEEE that contains toxic materials, such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, commonly found in electronic components.

• The hazardous waste content is calculated based on hardware composition reports from manufacturers and regulatory documents (e.g., EU RoHS Directives).
• The methodology identifies the weight of hazardous materials per device, combines it with hardware turnover rates, and aggregates the total waste volume generated by the network.
• If specific data is unavailable, comparable hardware types are used as proxies.