According to a recent study, mining for bitcoin generates substantial electronic waste that “represents a growing threat to the environment”.
A co-author of the report told AFP on Friday that the powerful computers used to detect the units of the world’s leading cryptocurrency had an average life cycle of just 1.3 years.
Alex de Vries noted that it was “much lower than any other electronic devices, such as the iPhones”.
The report said that at 30,700 tonnes, the amount of electronic waste generated from bitcoin mining in the 12 months to May was “equivalent to the amount of small IT and telecommunications equipment waste produced by a country such as the Netherlands”.
The race to find new bitcoins — on Friday, after a stellar rise this year that cost a single unit more than $47,000 — means the processing power of mining computers soon becomes obsolete.
According to the study published by the scientific journal Elsevier, the higher the price of bitcoin, the greater the amount of electronic waste.
Alex de Vries works as an economist at the Dutch central bank, while the report’s co-author Christian Stoll is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Despite the high volume of waste, it is a fraction of the global total from throwaway electronic equipment, which stood at 53.6 million tonnes last year.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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