The Flash Flood That Changed Everything

I am not one to trauma dump, but this story felt like it needed to be told.

I always say that you can ask me whatever you want about e-waste and electronics circularity – and while that is true, there is one question that will always cause me to stop in my tracks. It is the same question that explains why The E-Waste Column still exists – and why I actively decided to pump such large amounts of my personal assets into the project over the past few years, while knowing well that I am unlikely to ever see that money return into my own bank account.

The question I am talking about here is: “What role does e-waste play in climate change?” – or anything similar that strings e-waste and climate into one question. While it seems like a simple and innocent enough question (and you are most welcome to continue to ask me about it), there is a story behind why it always freezes me up for a moment or two.

A bit over 3 years ago, in the late afternoon on 22 May 2023, I was sitting behind my laptop at my parents’ house. It was an ordinary Monday, and I was listening to music while busily typing away on the keyboard. It was raining in the background, which is not unusual for late May at my parents’ house. The thing was just that this rain kept on getting louder and louder, and it soon started pounding with an incredible force against the window where I was sitting.

Within about half an hour, the rain flooded the fields behind my parents’ house and it poured onto the street in front of the house creating a river of water and soil that ripped everything that stood in its way with it. Within mere minutes after this, the water mass then poured into my parents’ driveway and ultimately forced its way into the garage and basement.

The part of this story that continues to live rent-free in my head to this day is my father and I standing knee-deep in the water in the basement looking at each other and then the fuse box and realizing, in the exact same moment, that there was only about 10 cm left between the base of the fuse box and the water level.

My father flicked off the main switch, and the water ultimately stopped just a centimeter or two short of the fuse box. That said, we still shoveled mud out of the house for days, spent weeks cleaning and repairing various devices, and ultimately ended up disposing of more e-waste than I think my family has produced over the past three decades combined.

The water and mud got into the washing machine, the dryer, the heating system, the generator, my dad’s classic car, my rowing machine, the lawnmower, the e-bikes, the electric sauna stove, and the power tools.

As someone who studied environmental law in university, I never thought that what happened would have such a profound impact on me – but it did, because the moment the flash flood came the impacts of climate change and its interplay with e-waste stopped being abstract and theoretical and became a memory that I just cannot seem to shake.

If you would like to share what impact The E-Waste Column has had in your life, you can submit your #impacttestimonials here.